


An Apple Cleft in Two

by aralias



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Blake as President, Curtain Fic, Doppelganger, Ensemble Cast, Established Relationship, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Friendship, Let's do the 'Mega Happy' Ending, M/M, Magic Science, One of My Favorites, Politics, Post Gauda Prime, Trope Bingo Round 2, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-24
Updated: 2013-10-24
Packaged: 2017-12-30 07:42:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 27,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1015947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aralias/pseuds/aralias
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Blake/Avon PGP Blake-is-President fic in which Blake is notable by his absence and Avon has to deal with this, a delegation of aliens, two irritable warlords, an uncomfortable sofa, and the fact that Tarrant sings in the shower at seven in the morning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An Apple Cleft in Two

**Author's Note:**

  * For [corngold](https://archiveofourown.org/users/corngold/gifts), [elviaprose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elviaprose/gifts).



> This is my 'Careless Whispers'. 
> 
> Idea talked over initially with x_los (at least some of it is therefore her fault). Then extensively cheerled by corngold and elviaprose.
> 
> Please excuse the science - it is there to serve a purpose in the emotional plot, not because I think this is how the universe works (I have no idea how the universe works).
> 
> Title from 'Twelfth Night', but it's nothing to do with 'Illyria', except that they're both B/A fics and I wrote both of them.

There were now only four hours before the Sholians arrived. Avon had finally received a message from Blake, but rather unhelpfully it simply read: _Negotiations haven’t finished here, Avon. I’m afraid I can’t leave without causing a diplomatic incident. I will try and accelerate matters as much as possible, though. In the meantime, I trust you to think of something. I’m very glad you’re there. Keep me updated. RB x_

“Write back,” Avon told Orac, “and tell him he’s a useless excuse for a human being, let alone a leader of men.”

The computer made a noise like an aggrieved sigh. “I do not need to remind you, Avon, that sending messages is outside of my primary function.”

“You’re right,” Avon said, “you don’t need to remind me, so why not shut up and do as you’re told for once?” He paced away from Orac and realised he was gnawing on the edge of his index finger: a nervous habit he’d presumably picked up from Blake. He removed his hand in disgust.

“I have passed on the message,” Orac said crossly. “Blake’s handheld is registering the data... He is formulating a reply. I shall display it on your screen.” For all its whinging, Orac was used enough to conveying messages between Blake and Avon that it didn’t try to recite the message out loud. Avon had long ago instructed Orac that hearing Blake’s messages in Orac’s irritable tone ruined them, even the ones that were already annoying, and so anything that came through from Blake should be conveyed to him in its original text form. 

Without much hope of receiving any useful information, Avon returned to his desk. Blake’s message read: _I miss you, too, Avon._ Avon could almost see the fond grin on Blake’s face. What he couldn’t see was a way out of the new mess Blake had got him into. 

“All right, Orac,” he said, leaning against its case, “you and I have four hours to think of an excuse good enough to pacify a group of very nervous Blake fanatics. Why isn’t he here, and why should they stay until he gets back?”

*

He still hadn’t thought of anything when Soolin knocked on the door of his office an hour later.

Orac had been about as unhelpful as it was possible for something that supposedly worked for Avon to be. Rather than offering any helpful suggestions of its own, it had contented itself merely with pointing out the major flaw in any of Avon’s ideas, namely that the Sholians had thus far only been willing to communicate with the hero of the revolution, namely Roj Blake. 

News of Blake’s exploits had apparently reached Luminar VII, even through the communications barrier they’d erected around their planet. According to the message Orac had picked up almost a year ago, they’d decided they could trust him. They’d endured more than four hundred years of isolation while the Federation had been expanding across the galaxy, and they’d decided to break it for Blake. It was an instinct that Avon understood, though he was as willing to condemn it in others as he was to condemn it in himself. 

Their representative had communicated with Blake on and off over a year via a shakey voice channel, with Avon looming over his shoulder but forbidden to speak in case it frightened them off. From what Avon had gathered, it seemed that during their absence from the universe, they’d developed some very interesting technology, such as this communications barrier that not even Orac could break through. Avon’s fingers itched when he thought of it.

It also seemed that Sholians were in serious trouble – their population was expanding to the point where in a few decades they would not be able to survive on their relatively small world. That was one of the reasons they’d chosen to make contact now. 

Once he’d been informed of the situation, Blake had begun to press them for a meeting, if nothing else. People were dying due to increasingly cramped living quarters and insufficient food supplies, and Blake’s instinct was to put a stop to it as soon as possible. Unfortunately, this insistence on a face-to-face meeting had apparently been a mistake, since the Sholians hadn’t spoken to him again for four months. Then six hours ago Blake’s contact, Yuriana, had suddenly written to say they were on their way to Residence One. 

Unfortunately, Blake was half way across the galaxy in discussions with the Teal government about trading routes. Even if he left immediately at time-distort twelve he wasn’t going to be able to arrive in time to greet them, and apparently he wasn’t going to leave immediately. Blake had always been a man who took his obligations seriously, and becoming president of the galaxy had only made it worse. 

That left Avon with three hours and a very limited number of options. If he got it wrong, then the Sholians might never come out of hiding again. Millions of Sholians would die, Avon would never get his new technology, and Blake would be incredibly disappointed in him. 

“Would they be willing to meet him on Teal?” he asked the computer as Soolin closed the office door. 

“The vagaries of the human mind are unpredictable,” Orac said, “but it seems likely that they would refuse, since they have no knowledge of Teal. Such a suggestion would be fifty-six per cent more likely to destabilise their confidence in Blake’s ability to-”

“All right, that’s enough.”

“How’s the containment plan going?” Soolin asked. 

Avon gave her a sour look as she sat down in his chair. “In an hour, I’ll start moving my things out of Blake’s rooms.”

“So, not well, then,” Soolin said. 

“You could say that.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. You might learn to appreciate the extra space. And you’ve said before that he snores.”

“You’re right,” Avon said. “I should look on the bright side, thank you, Soolin. Millions may die, but at least I’ll have somewhere to store my hollovid collection at last. And I’ll be able to sleep at night - assuming I can ignore the millions of deaths on my conscience.” 

“It was a joke, Avon.”

“Yes, I know, although I admit the lack of humorous content did confuse me for a moment.”

She smiled wryly. “Sorry. I still find it hard to believe you actually care about people you’ve never met.”

“Not only that,” Avon said. “Millions of people that even _Blake_ hasn’t met.” 

His eyes widened, and he knew he was about to be brilliant, to see the solution that nobody else would have seen. _“That’s it,”_ he murmured. 

“What is?”

“ _Blake_ hasn’t met them,” Avon said. “Or rather, _they_ haven’t met Blake. They may not have even seen a picture of him – visual signals are _blocked_ by the communication barrier. They’d have descriptions, but nothing concrete.” He turned back to the computer. “Orac, what is the likelihood that we would be able to successfully fool the Sholians into believing that another man was Blake for the course of their visit?”

“They have spoken to him extensively-”

“And _I_ have been present at every conversation.”

“You would not be a suitable candidate to impersonate Blake, given that your physical appearance and voice are quite dissimilar-”

“But if I were to provide information about the Sholians to someone who did _not_ look dissimilar?”

“Then I calculate that the deception would have a fifty-two per cent chance of success, depending on the person chosen,” Orac said. “By no means a certainty-”

“-but good enough,” Avon said. He pressed the button on the teleport bracelet he still wore on his wrist. “Tarrant?”

There was a brief pause and then Tarrant’s voice crackled through the speaker grill. “What is it, Avon? I’m busy.” 

“Get up here.”

“I said I’m busy.”

“And I said get up here. Since my word counts for rather more around here than yours, I’m not sure what we’re still talking about.”

“My professional obligation,” Tarrant said. “If you’ve got a problem with that, take it up with the man who put me in charge of Space Academy.”

“I would,” Avon said. “But he’s currently outside of Alliance space. In his absence, I have full powers and I’m using them to promote you.”

“Really?” Tarrant said suspiciously. “What to?”

“President,” Avon said and dropped the connection. 

Soolin shook her head, smiling. “It won’t work, you know. Whatever Orac says.”

Avon grinned. “Want to bet?”

“Not particularly,” she said. “Vila probably will, though. He likes to wager on a sure thing.”

*

“Three thousand credits,” Vila said thoughtfully. He had his feet propped up on Avon’s desk, despite earlier attempts to dislodge them or make him do anything useful. Dayna was working on a small earpiece that Tarrant could wear so that Avon could feed him all the information he would need in order to become Blake. Soolin, meanwhile, was off coordinating Blake’s apparent return to the presidential palace – fortunately Blake usually teleported from the ship directly into his own office so there was no need to actually produce him, but air traffic control would need to be informed, as would the household staff and a small number of news networks. The new president himself had reluctantly agreed to the scheme once Avon had pointed out that if he didn’t then he was going to be out of a job, and was currently changing into some of Blake’s smarter clothes in Avon’s stationery cupboard. 

“ _Vila,_ ” Dayna protested. “You can’t actually bet on something like this.”

“Why not?” Vila said as Avon finished typing his message to Blake. This one read: _All right, we don’t need you any more. Tarrant will handle it._ It wasn’t a particularly personal message, but as a general rule he didn’t like to flaunt his private communications with Blake in front of people who would want to comment on them, so he had switched to manual input. 

“Well, for a start, people’s lives are at stake,” Dayna told Vila. “It’s ghoulish.”

The message on Avon’s screen changed to: _Charming. Are you planning to let me know what Tarrant’s plan is, or should I guess?_

Avon grinned and typed back: _It’s my plan, and my plan is: Tarrant will handle it._

“Now Dayna, don’t think I don’t understand the gravity of the situation,” Vila said. “I do. That’s why I offered such a respectable wager. It’ll help take my mind off the pain if we lose. I’ll raise it to four thousand, if you like.”

“ _Vila,_ ” Dayna protested. 

“Done,” Avon said and reached over to shake his hand. “ _But_ ,” he said, hanging onto Vila’s wrist, “I can do everything in my power to make this scheme successful, while you can do nothing to deliberately sabotage it. That includes,” he said as Vila opened his mouth to agree, “deliberately ignoring instructions from me that you know I need you to follow.”

Vila looked quite pleased that Avon had bothered to force through this stipulation, probably, knowing Vila, because it proved Avon was taking the bet seriously. “Five thousand,” he said. 

“Six,” Avon said. 

“Done,” Vila said, shaking his hand. 

“All right,” Avon said. “You can start by switching all of Blake’s access codes, retina scans and fingerprints over with Tarrant’s.” 

He glanced down at Blake’s newest message, which read: _I’m getting confused. Knowing you, I realise that’s likely to be the point, but this is important, Avon, so explain yourself in full, please. Start at the beginning. Why aren’t you handling it?_

Avon typed: _I don’t have curly hair_ into the computer, and turned to Dayna. “How’s the earphone coming?” 

Dayna sighed and held the small device up between thumb and forefinger. “I’ve managed to take it down by another centimetre, but I think you can still see it. Any more, though, and you’re going to lose reception.” 

“All right,” Avon said, “that’ll have to do. If anyone asks, Tarrant can say he’s expecting an important personal call.”

Vila pointed at Avon with a hand now holding a datapad. “Perhaps the baby’s on its way,” he said as though this was a highly plausible suggestion, and Avon shoved his feet off the desk irritably.

“Shouldn’t you be switching the access codes?”

“Already done it,” Vila said, holding up the datapad, which Avon belatedly realised was one of his. “Ask Orac if you don’t believe me.” 

“Oh, why shouldn’t we?” Dayna said playfully. “After all, when have you _ever_ tried to con us, Vila?” 

The door behind Avon opened and he caught the smell of Blake’s cologne as he inhaled – it made his breath catch in his throat even though he knew it was only Tarrant, and he scowled in an attempt to cover it. 

“That’s true,” Vila said. “I am known for my scrupulous honesty. Besides, any minute now, Avon, you’re going to ask me to fix Tarrant’s face. I’m just thinking ahead, trying to be helpful, you know.”

Tarrant sat down in one of the remaining visitor’s chairs. He’d filled out over the last five years and he was slightly taller than Blake, so Blake’s clothes didn’t look like a fancy dress outfit on a child, but they did still look like Blake’s clothes on a man who wasn’t Blake. This particular outfit was one of Avon’s favourites – a collection of dark greens and blues in rich velvets, with wide sleeves and tight trousers. It suited Tarrant, but it had looked better on Blake. In fact, the last time Blake had worn it Avon had been forced to tug him into a cupboard and suck him off during a break between the courses of an official dinner. 

He had already resolved not to share this information with Tarrant, who had, coincidentally, also attended the same dinner. 

“What’s wrong with my face?” Tarrant asked, putting his feet up on Avon’s desk in the space Vila’s had only recently vacated.

“The fact that words sometimes come out of it,” Dayna said. “Other than that, it’s fine.” Avon glanced up at her and she laughed. “Sorry, did you want to take that one?”

“No, no, go ahead.”

“Hey, it was my set-up,” Vila protested. “Why does no one think of me?”

“You’re all hilarious,” Tarrant said. “And by hilarious, I mean jealous.”

“Well, of course,” Avon said. “Why wouldn’t we be?” 

“Yes, why _wouldn’t_ we be?” Dayna echoed. 

“Hilarious,” Tarrant said as the other three grinned over whatever they were doing. “And if what you meant earlier, Vila, was that I don’t have a scar, I assume I can just wear an eye patch.”

“The president of the New Alliance does not wear an eye patch,” Avon told him. “The sleeves are bad enough. Any more steps towards the piratical and nobody will ever take Blake seriously again. Assuming,” he smiled, “that they ever did.”

“Sorry,” Tarrant said, not sounding sorry at all, “but I’m wearing an eye patch or you can find someone else to play your boyfriend.”

Avon’s eye flickered the way it did whenever anyone referred to Blake this way but he smiled. “But Vila has already offered to fix you. You wouldn’t want to disappoint him, now would you?” 

“Forget it,” Tarrant said. “I don’t care how good reconstructive surgery is these days-”

“Who said anything about surgery?” Vila asked. 

“Tarrant’s justifiable paranoia,” Avon said. “But in this case, Tarrant, you have nothing to fear. Vila is not nearly as incompetent as he looks.”

“That’s sounds like an insult, but I’ve worked hard to look this unassuming,” Vila said. “So, thanks, Avon.”

“You’re welcome.”

“And you’re right. I may now be a respected member of the community-”

“Respected by _who?”_ Dayna said in disbelief.

“Respected by me, that’s who,” Vila said, “and Blake – and plenty of other people. But I’ve been a master criminal since before either of you two, Tarrant and Dayna, were even born. Even Avon was only about forty.”

 _“Watch it,”_ Avon said darkly. 

“The point is I’m not just a talented pair of hands,” Vila said, dropping the datapad back onto the table. “I am also.... a master of disguise.” 

Tarrant sighed. “Don’t be an idiot, Vila.”

“I’m not being an idiot, Vila. Blending in is a vital Delta survival skill, particularly if you don’t want to be caught running away from someone’s house with a pocket full of valuables. They might see me legging it, but they never knew who they’d seen. I’ve got my kit here – I can do you a good scar in about three hours.”

“We’ve only got two hours until they arrive,” Tarrant pointed out as Vila rounded on him with a sponge. 

“He sounds like Blake already,” Vila said wearily. “Tilt your chin up-”

“And try not to fall asleep under Vila’s soothing ministrations,” Avon said. 

“I really wasn’t going to,” Tarrant said as the sponge poked his eye. 

“Because we have got a lot to go over,” Avon told him, “and, as you point out, only two hours to go over it in.” He sat on the edge of his desk next to Tarrant’s feet. “I’ll be in your ear the entire time, but the more natural and immediate your responses are the more convincing it will be. How much do you know about the Sholians and Luminar Seven?”

“Not much,” Tarrant said, enjoying a temporary respite as Vila turned away to mix various fluid compounds together. “The planet’s in the Rivellan Cluster. It’s Earth-type and it’s been closed for years. That’s all that’s public knowledge.”

“Blake is rather better informed. I’ve written a briefing document, but there’s no time for you to actually read it today, so try not to talk about the planet.”

“Isn’t that why they’re coming?” Dayna said. “To talk about the planet, I mean. If so, it’s going to be a bit difficult for Tarrant-”

“-to improvise,” Avon said, “but not impossible.” He turned back to Tarrant. “You can read the briefing tonight, but for now-”

 _“Tonight?”_ Tarrant said. “How long is this thing going to go on for?”

“-what you _will_ need to know,” Avon said, ignoring him, “are the personal facts of the case. Blake’s contact is called Yuriana. And as far as we know-”

“Avon, should I have told my wife?”

“Keep still, Tarrant,” Vila said, wrenching his head back towards the light.

“As far as we know,” Avon repeated, “she is middle-aged and she is a scientist, rather than a career politician.”

“It’s all right,” Dayna said. “I’ll tell Leyla where you are.”

“She has two male children, Jak and Parl, six and eight respectively. Her ex-wife is called Marrey- They divorced about three years ago and the relationship is still frosty. Her current partner is called Deb – stop me if I’m going too fast. Yuriana made contact with Blake a year ago on behalf of the high council of Luminar. The message was relayed by Orac to Blake’s personal computer in his rooms. He was eating dinner – I can’t remember what exactly it was, but I doubt that will be relevant-”

He looked up as the door of the office slid open to admit Soolin, who was carrying a large stack of framed portraits under her arm. At the moment, Avon could only see the back of one of them, as the rest were facing towards Soolin, but he knew from their frames that they were all portraits of Blake. Specifically, the one closest to him was the one that hung in the reception, then the next one in was from the President’s Gallery, and then the next one was from the dining hall, and the one closest to Soolin was from the Blue Room. All of them, photograph and oil paint, showed some variation of Blake’s attempt at a fatherly smile: wise and stern, but ultimately forgiving. Avon had a reject from one of the photo shoots framed on his bedside cabinet. It showed Blake laughing at something (he couldn’t remember what now), Blake’s unscarred eye creasing at the corner. It was that photograph that Avon thought of whenever he saw the pictures of the public’s Blake framed around the palace: a photograph that nobody else ever saw. Which was not to say that the public’s Blake wasn’t his Blake, too. 

There were no pictures of Blake in Avon’s office where people could have seen and remarked on them, or at least there hadn’t been. Now, thanks to Soolin, there were four. 

“How did it go?” he asked her, abandoning Tarrant to Vila again. 

“Well, as far as the palace is concerned, the president has returned,” she said, dumping the portraits against the wall. “He’s currently recuperating from his journey in Councillor Avon’s office. I thought that would keep the palace staff away since everyone knows that means you’re screwing each other senseless.”

“They all know that, do they?” 

“Yes,” Dayna and Vila said in chorus, and Avon’s eyebrows rose in irritated surprise. It wasn’t as though the room wasn’t soundproofed and well cleaned. And yet people knew. Presumably Blake had been indiscreet at some point, which was annoying, since Avon had already made it clear that he didn’t want what they felt about each other or did with each other to be public property. Their relationship wasn’t a secret, but Avon’s view was that the fewer people talked about it the better. He and Blake both occupied positions of supposed respect in the new government – if people were gossiping about their sex life then they were not being taken seriously as politicians. It would probably make sense not to be ‘screwing’ Blake at all if he wanted to stay in office, but since Avon was only in office because Blake had forced him to stand for election that didn’t seem possible or desirable. 

“Not in these clothes,” Tarrant said wretchedly. 

“Not _in here_ , no,” Avon said to punish him for everyone else being amused. 

“Right,” Tarrant said relieved.

“It was a cupboard just outside the dining hall.”

Tarrant’s brain finished processing that statement and his face fell. “Ugh. _Avon.”_

 _“Avon,”_ Orac said, apparently echoing Tarrant, “I have now received a total of twelve requests for audiences with Blake, all of which I have re-routed to your computer, despite other demands on my attention. They are displayed for you now.”

“Don’t read too much into it,” Soolin said in response to the glance Avon shot at her as he crossed back to his monitor. “They’re probably all foreign dignitaries who don’t know you.”

Avon scanned down the list of requests as Orac continued reeling off names and priority ratings. They were all foreign dignitaries he didn’t know. 

“You also have another message from Blake,” Orac finished. “Once again, I must point out that a secretary would be more-”

Avon held up a hand “That’s enough, Orac. Schedule all the priority twos into my diary,” he told it, “around the Sholian visit. Today and tomorrow. Don’t tell them they won’t be meeting Blake. And leave me at least... two hours this evening to finish going over the plan with Tarrant. Then put Blake’s message on screen.” 

There was a whirr and a flash of lights from Orac, and then it said crossly, “I have displayed the message,” and Blake’s message flared white and blocky on the black screen. 

_Negotiations have concluded successfully. I had to make a few compromises I wasn’t that keen on and I’m afraid I called in Max’s debt with you several times over, but everyone seems satisfied. We can discuss the particulars later. Jenna’s staying to smooth everything over, but I’ve given the order for time-distort fourteen, so I should be home within two days. Stall the Sholians until then. Blake_

“What is it?” Dayna asked as Avon laughed. 

“Blake hates the plan,” Avon told her. 

“Does that mean it’s all – _ow_ – off?” Tarrant asked hopefully, wincing as Vila applied more hot gelatine to his skin.

Avon grinned at him. “What do you think?”

*

Avon had already given orders that the landing bay be entirely cleared of personnel and, ten minutes before the estimated time of arrival, he sent Soolin to organise the evacuation of all the corridors between the landing bay and the suite assigned to the Sholians. That meant Tarrant was standing alone in the landing bay when the ship touched down. 

Vila had done a good job replicating Blake’s scar on Tarrant’s flawless face. Tarrant himself had altered his stance, losing some of the FSA’s rigid discipline in favour of Blake’s easy confidence. The deception wouldn’t fool anyone who actually knew Blake or had seen a photograph of him, but it was good enough that it might fool someone who had only ever passed him in the corridor, or an elderly relative who remembered him from when he was small. Or a foreign diplomat who had only ever spoken to him over a crackly radio. Avon felt genuinely confident as he watched the insta-generated footage that Orac was beaming into his office from the security cameras in the hanger. This insane scheme _would_ succeed. Eventually, Blake might even be grateful. 

Tomorrow’s negotiations would take place in the Blue Room, which had a large two-way mirror above the ornate fireplace. Today, however, Avon, Vila and Dayna were crowded around the monitors in Avon’s office as the hatch at the back of the Sholian ship slowly winched open. The grainy footage showed it standing empty for a moment and then three people emerged – two women of around Avon’s age, and an older man. Fashions had changed considerably since those recorded in the Federation archives from before Luminar’s closure. The women were wearing long, pale blue robes, their hair in complicated braids piled on top of their heads. The man wore a darker brown robe and his hair, which was far longer than was fashionable elsewhere in the ex-Federation, was also braided, although it hung down his back. 

“Are you getting this, Avon?” Tarrant murmured in the microphone attached to his lapel.

“Yes. We can see them.”

“Which one is Yuriana?”

“No way to be sure. But she’s probably the one at the front.”

“And she’s probably not the man,” Vila added.

“Vila,” Avon said, turning to him, “I appreciate your support, of course, but in this situation you can be of most help... by not contributing in any way. Do you think you can manage that?”

“Thanks a lot,” Vila said. 

“If you need help, I could always gag you,” Dayna said, giving Vila a smile that said she wasn’t joking. 

“All right. Stay with me,” Tarrant said and began to stride towards the Sholians. The second camera in the room swivelled after him, keeping his face in shot. Apparently unable to resist, Tarrant flashed one of his most dazzling smiles as he held out his hand. “Thank you for coming.”

“Less of the teeth, Tarrant,” Avon said into the mic, and had the pleasure of seeing Tarrant’s smile tighten briefly before it was back. 

“You must be Yuriana.” 

“And you must be Blake,” she said warmly.

“Yes, I must,” Tarrant said without a trace of irony. 

“You’re younger than I thought you’d be – but just as handsome.” 

“I think they call it well preserved,” Tarrant said smoothly, “when they’re being polite.” Avon’s fingers unclenched from around the edge of the desk. “I can’t tell you what a pleasure it is to finally meet you.” He smiled again and turned to the others. “All three of you.”

“Oh, yes. I’m sorry. How rude of me,” Yuriana said. “Yes. Blake - this is Ren Garrock,” she indicated the man, who bowed, “Environment Secretary. And Mella Krin, who is in charge of the comm. shield project. Ren, Mella- Roj Blake.”

“Never heard of them,” Avon told Tarrant. He glanced up as Soolin entered quietly and took a seat next to Dayna. “The last I knew somebody called Gol Rane was Environment Secretary. And she never said who was in charge of the shield.”

“Delighted to meet you,” Tarrant said smoothly, “and welcome to Earth. I’m sure we all have a lot to talk about.” More bowing from both of them to the extent that Tarrant bowed, too. Then he indicated the exit. “Would you follow me? I’ll show you to the rooms we’ve set aside for you while you’re here.”

“Thank you,” Yuriana said. 

With a jerk, the security-camera feed shifted out to the corridors where it refocused on the back of Tarrant’s head. 

“Your message was not very specific about how many people were coming,” he was saying, oiling the awkward social situation with rather meaningless prattle probably better than Blake would have done, “so we’ve set aside quite a large suite. You don’t need to use all of it, and if you want something smaller or different in any way, just let me know and I’ll arrange it.” 

“Ask how long they’re staying,” Avon said, and obediently Tarrant said, as though he’d just thought of it, 

“Incidentally, how long do you think you’ll stay?”

“We’re hoping to be back within a week,” Yuriana said. “I have appointments booked for Monday, and Mella will want to check the shield frequencies-”

“Yes, of course. Naturally. It’s very good of you to come, Mella,” Tarrant said to Mella Krin, “given that what we’re trying to do here is put you out of a job.” She laughed politely. “But I hope we can offer you some serious compensations. And I understand my boyfriend is very keen to work with you, so if you were interested, you could certainly work in the palace.”

“ _Tarrant,_ ” Avon barked as Vila began choking. “Blake does _not_ use that word.”

“Although I should warn you,” Tarrant said, “he can be very difficult. I don’t know why I put up with him, really.” 

“Where is everybody?” Garrock said as they turned the corner and a new security camera took over the feed. He had a brisk, purposeful voice that suggested he might have a military background. Avon made a note of this and then remembered there was no way of getting Orac to look into it with Krin’s comm. shield still in operation and put down the pen in frustration. 

“I sent them away,” Tarrant said. “Didn’t want to overwhelm you on your first day. I hope that doesn’t seem patronising.”

“It’s thoughtful,” Yuriana said, “but hopefully unnecessary. Being off-planet is slightly unnerving, I admit, but we’re all adults. And I, at least, feel very safe being here with you.” 

Avon made a face as Tarrant chuckled. “Thank you.”

“Besides,” Yuriana continued, “compared to being in space, it’s positively relaxing. How do people stand it for long flights?”

“It can actually be quite pleasant,” Tarrant said, without making it too obvious that he’d spent most of his life training for long flights and the last five years training other people to stand them. “When you’re used to it. You might even come to enjoy it.”

“Actually there are some people we’re interested in meeting, aren’t there?” Garrock said. “Your chap, for example, Blake- what was his name?”

“Avon,” Yuriana and Tarrant supplied as Avon himself said, 

“No. Absolutely not.”

“That’s right,” Garrock said. “Kerr Avon. Absolute wizard with computers, isn’t he? Might even given some of ours a run for their money.”

“I’m afraid he’s very busy this week,” Tarrant said as Avon rolled his eyes at this patronising appraisal of his talents.

“Oh,” Krin said in a small voice. “What a shame.” 

It was the first time she’d spoken and the exclamation seemed to have been shocked out of her. She smiled quickly to cover it but that just made it look worse. Brutally, the security cameras relayed this in full to Avon’s office monitor. Vila gave Avon a look that said he should feel guilty, which Avon resented because he already felt guilty enough. He hadn’t invited her, and it wasn’t his fault that circumstances made it impossible that they should meet, but enough exposure to Blake had apparently encouraged Avon’s heart to bleed for things that were nothing to do with him. It was particularly unfair and annoying on this occasion, because Avon wanted Krin’s technology very badly and had been prepared to be nice to her to get it. But as well as Tarrant was doing, and he was doing well, Avon was not prepared to leave him to fend for himself. Today’s conversation was primarily small talk – Tarrant would be floundering with anything that required knowledge of the particular situation or detailed knowledge about Blake. So Mella Krin would have to be disappointed and live with it.

Tarrant clearly felt the awkwardness of the situation, too, because he said, “You see, I’ve been away for the last fortnight, and Avon’s been looking after things here. And now you’re here and you have to be my top priority, which is as it should be, but I’m afraid it leaves poor old Avon with very little time to himself.”

“You don’t need to explain. I completely understand,” Yuriana said. “But it wouldn’t have to be a formal meeting. If he could spare half an hour in the evening, some time this week-”

“No,” Avon said.

“For a drink, or perhaps dinner-”

 _“No,”_ Avon said.

“I’ll... see what I can do,” Tarrant said in a tone that made it clear that unfortunately Avon was unreasonable and probably wouldn’t be persuaded. 

“Get them off this subject, Tarrant,” Avon told him. 

“Almost there,” Tarrant said bracingly. “Just one more corridor to go. I’m sure you’ll be glad for a chance to freshen up after your journey. How long did you say it was?”

“About three days,” Yuriana said. “I’m sure that doesn’t sound like a lot to you-”

“Actually, it does,” Tarrant said. “Considering how close Luminar is to Earth. Space transport has evolved considerably over the past four hundred years – if you don’t mind, I could have someone take a look at your ship while you’re here and install one of our Photonic drives. At time-distort five you should be back within about twenty-four hours.”

“One of your Avon’s inventions, is it?” Garrock asked. 

“Not exactly,” Tarrant said. “But he replicated it from Dr Plaxton’s original, which wasn’t an easy job, even with Orac’s help. He is as good as you’ve heard, but don’t tell him I told you so.” 

“Nice touch, but this isn’t _off_ the subject,” Avon said, feeling a mixture of resentment and pleasure that he was now having to stop people talking about how brilliant he was. 

“It doesn’t sound like we’ll have the chance,” Garrock pointed out. 

Tarrant laughed. “That’s a good point. As I say, I will ask him. Incidentally, Minister, I don’t mean to be rude, but what happened to Rane?”

“Oh – there was an election,” Yuriana said. “About a month ago. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I was quite busy. That’s why I haven’t been able to talk to you recently. He lost by a landslide.”

“And good riddance,” Krin muttered. Yuriana tutted and Krin coloured. 

“I don’t like him either,” Garrock volunteered, apparently in Krin’s defence. “And,” he said, seeming to gain conviction as he spoke, “since _his_ party’s policies were directly responsible for-”

“Stop it, Ren,” Yuriana said. “Nobody here needs to be convinced you were right.” She looked embarrassed and Avon surmised from Krin and Garrock’s behaviour that they’d agreed on the journey over not to speak ill of their previous government in case it made them look unprofessional, which it did. Avon didn’t actually care in the truest sense, but it was interesting information that might be useful later. 

“If it helps, I don’t like him either,” Tarrant said. “And I’ve never even met the man.”

Yuriana looked surprised, but then she smiled. “Well, he is a difficult person to get along with, I won’t deny it. And his policies were not as well thought out as perhaps-”

Garrock snorted. “I doubt they were thought out at all.”

“But now he’s gone,” Yuriana said firmly. “In fact, that’s why we were finally able to come.”

“A change in administration?” Tarrant said.

“Yes. As you know, our former government were willing to talk to you, but frustratingly unwilling to act. Ren’s government was elected partly on the strength of their promise to finally send a delegation to Earth.”

“And here you are,” Tarrant said warmly. “And,” he said, coming to a stop outside a door, “here we are.” He pressed a hand to the door-control and it slid open to reveal a large, well-furnished suite. “The comm. buttons by the door,” he explained, having been briefed about this beforehand, “should connect you to my personal frequency and to the man I’ve put in charge of taking care of you while you’re here. His name is Aliot. If you need anything at all, please just ask him.” 

He raised his teleport bracelet to his mouth. “Vila, are you there?”

The question seemed to echo in Avon’s office as it came from both the bracelet on Vila’s wrist and from then microphone relay on Tarrant’s lapel.

“Er,” Vila said, having clearly not been listening to the briefing Avon had given Tarrant, “yes.” He raised the bracelet to his mouth. “What is it, Ta-” he turned the ‘Ta’ sound into the beginning of a cough as Avon raised a hand to thump him. “Sorry – what was that, Blake? Terribly dusty in here. I should really have a clean out.”

“Could you come down and set up the locking mechanisms for our Sholian guests please? They’re in room three of the second floor.”

“I can do it from here, if you like.”

“I know you can,” Tarrant said. “Now come down here and do it. I’d rather our guests didn’t think all my friends were too important to make an appearance.”

Vila looked at Avon, who nodded. “All right. I’ll be right there in five minutes.” He sighed. “I wouldn’t want people thinking I was important.”

“I’ll leave you in Vila’s capable hands,” Tarrant said on the screen as Vila gave Avon a rather sour look at having to move and left the office. “We’ll reconvene tomorrow at eleven in the Blue Room, if that’s all right. Aliot will be able to direct you there.”

“Thank you,” Yuriana said. “For everything.”

Tarrant smiled one of his more genuine smiles. “My pleasure. See you tomorrow.” 

Avon watched him walk out of shot and then leant back in his chair. “You were saying?” he asked Soolin. 

“There’s still a week to go,” she pointed out. “Don’t get too excited.”

“I’m not,” Avon said. 

“I admit, it’s going better than I expected, though,” she said. “Mind you, I expected it to fail immediately, so that’s not saying much.” She stood. “You owe Tarrant a drink.” 

“Or a raise,” Dayna suggested. She grinned and followed Soolin out of the office. 

Avon nodded to himself as they left. It occurred to him briefly that he was surprisingly lucky to know people who would do this for him, then he dismissed the thought. He’d blackmailed Tarrant with unemployment, bribed Vila with the chance of winning several thousand credits, and Dayna and Soolin were only taking part because they thought there was the possibility the fall-out would be funny. If this was friendship, they should all ask for their money back. 

Still, he caught himself smiling anyway and contemplating how much more Tarrant would need to put his children through private tuition. Another ten thousand a year would probably not be unwelcome. 

Not that they’d succeeded yet. The Sholians would be here for another week, and Blake wasn’t back for at least forty-eight hours. 

“All right, Orac,” he said to the only other member of the ex-Scorpio crew still in the office. “Who do we have to deal with next?”

*

Three hours later, after a long and irritating discussion about the next interplanetary games with a set of people who only wanted to speak to Blake, Avon turned into the corridor that led to the presidential suite. 

“Tarrant?” he said into his teleport bracelet. 

“Yes, Avon.”

“Meet me in my rooms in twenty minutes,” Avon said as he approached his door. “And Tarrant - don’t be late. I’m tired and we have a lot to go over.”

“I don’t think lateness will be a problem,” Tarrant said and the door slid open to reveal him sitting on Avon’s sofa. He switched off the music that had been playing in the background and grinned. “Hi honey, you’re home.” 

“What are you doing here?” Avon said flatly.

“I live here,” Tarrant said. “At least,” he said as Avon raised his eyebrows, “according to the locks. I can’t get into my building and, when I called Vila, he pointed out that it wouldn’t be a good idea if Blake’s codes were used to go in at night and not used to exit until the morning. Don’t want it getting around that he’s having an affair with my wife. I thought that wasn’t a bad point.”

It wasn’t, but, rather than assuage Avon’s bad mood, the fact that Vila had foreseen a problem Avon hadn’t even considered merely added to his irritation. “All right. So, you stay here until the Sholians are gone,” he said, trying to sound as though it was nothing. “At least I’ll know where you are when I need you to do something.” 

He made a quick scan of the room, which looked relatively respectable since Blake had been gone for almost a fortnight. There were no sex toys out on the surfaces, no open wine bottles and none of Blake’s abandoned clothes on the floor. The only incriminating objects were those that were always out on display. 

Avon strolled across towards the bed, dropped his jacket onto the pale-blue comforter and casually tipped the photograph of Blake laughing face-down onto the bedside cabinet. 

Blake’s side of the bed had one of the two of them together at some outdoor event. Like Avon’s photograph of Blake, it was a lost moment from a larger public collection. The two of them were framed by out-of-focus leaves because the picture had been taken with a sniper lens from several yards away, and Blake was smiling, stroking the hair back from Avon’s face, and Avon... was looking at Blake like he was everything. 

Blake didn’t usually interfere with the free press because he didn’t want them to know that he was a hypocrite. When the article containing the photograph in question had arrived at the palace for approval, though, he had gone down personally to the magazine headquarters to ask that it be removed. He had returned (drunk) several hours later, with the assurances that another photograph would be used, and the negatives. Avon had reluctantly allowed him to keep them after Blake had explained he’d had to work quite hard to charm the magazine staff, and had spent the evening buying rounds to that effect, _for_ Avon, rather than because he wanted to get pissed or for some mysterious Blake-reason of his own. 

Avon considered whether it was possible to casually walk around the bed and hide this photo too, decided it wasn’t, and then did it anyway. Better Tarrant see that, than that he see the photo. 

“I’ve been here for several hours,” Tarrant pointed out from the sofa. 

“So?” Avon said, inwardly cursing himself and Vila and Blake and Tarrant and especially Vila. He yanked the bedside cabinet drawer open, dropped the photograph inside it, and shut it again. 

“And Blake asked me in for a drink a few months ago,” Tarrant said. “So I’ve already seen your room.”

“What a fascinating story,” Avon said. “I only hope it makes your memoirs.” His eyes flicked back to the bed and his brain registered the discrepancy. “You’ve changed the sheets.” They had been aubergine this morning. 

“Yes,” Tarrant said. 

“Why?”

“I would have thought that would have been obvious after your earlier revelation about Blake’s clothes. I prefer a bed I know I can trust, as a general rule.”

“I don’t see what difference it makes,” Avon said, “since you’ll be sleeping on the sofa.”

“I don’t think so,” Tarrant said.

“You prefer the floor?”

“I have leverage,” Tarrant said. 

“You think so, do you?”

“That’s right. You can’t replace me now I’ve been introduced as Blake. Sorry, hadn’t you thought of that? And you’re at least a foot shorter than me. So if anyone’s sleeping on the sofa, Avon, it’s you.” He smiled infuriatingly. “Unless you prefer the floor.”

Avon gave him a very sour look, but Tarrant was right and he was tired. “All right. I’ll sleep on the sofa,” he said, taking a seat on it. It was not a particularly comfortable sofa, having been a gift from Sarkoff a few years ago and therefore an antique from before the time when the science of relaxation had reached its peak. Avon spared a moment to regret that Blake had uncharacteristically given in and allowed him to install it in their rooms in place of the large, squashy, ugly velvet one Blake had previously favoured, but he knew he couldn’t possibly have anticipated this chain of events. 

“Thank you,” Tarrant said, sitting at the other end. He hefted a large pile of typed paper onto his lap from the floor. “Now, I asked Orac to print your Sholian briefing-”

This was a surprise, although it probably shouldn’t have been. Avon let it show on his face. “How enterprising of you.”

“-and I have a few questions,” Tarrant said as though he, at least, hadn’t expected Avon’s reaction to be any different. “For example, it states here,” he indicated an area on the second page that he’d marked in red pen, “that last October Blake proposed moving forty per cent of the Sholian population to Khazan. It goes on to say that the scheme was abandoned, due to a lack of suitable mineral deposits and the location of the planet, but not when this change happened, or whose decision it was.”

Avon explained, and then answered several other minor questions about things he hadn’t bothered to include because Blake (for whom the document was originally intended) had already known. He then grilled Tarrant on the Sholian interpersonal information he’d given Tarrant earlier in the day, and finished off with some points about Blake as an individual. 

“And finally - I advise you to avoid the topic completely, but if do you have to refer to me, I suggest you use my surname and leave it at that.”

“Not boyfriend, then,” Tarrant said. 

“Not if you value your continued existence.”

“I’m sorry,” Tarrant said. “I knew that was a mistake as soon as I said it.” He sighed in exasperation, got to his feet and stretched. “How am I supposed to refer to your relationship with Blake then?” he asked as he wandered over into the kitchen area. 

“You don’t,” Avon said. “If it is absolutely necessary, ‘my chief advisor’ should be sufficient.”

Tarrant emerged from the kitchen again with a glass of wine and a bottle Avon recognised as one of those he would have hidden if he’d had time before Tarrant had arrived. “Not partner?” he asked.

“Not unless we’ve gone into business together.”

“All right. What about live-in lover?” Tarrant suggested, with a grin that Avon did not return. “Significant other? Fuck buddy? Beau? I know, what about – my beloved? Not ‘better half’ – we’d have difficulty convincing anyone of that.”

“Chief advisor,” Avon repeated. “And you’re not as funny as you think you are.”

“I’m sorry, Avon. It just seems a bit cold.”

“The object of this exercise is not for you to convince the world that you are in love with me. The object is to replicate what Blake would do in this situation.”

“I’ve heard Blake use about half of those terms,” Tarrant said. 

“You what?” Avon said. “Which half?” he added stupidly. “Not... that I believe you.”

“Or care?”

Avon grinned. “Right.” 

Tarrant grinned back, clearly taking pity on him, which was embarrassing. “Partner, mainly. He did say beau once, but I’m fairly sure it was a joke. Are we done here?” 

Avon nodded absently. Partner was... the least bad of the possible alternatives. In fact, now he thought about it, the level of equality the term implied was almost as touching as it was unlikely. 

“Good,” Tarrant said briskly. “Can I use your comm. system, then? I assume it’s secure.”

“Go ahead,” Avon said, waving towards the desk with its inset screen. He rose to his feet, rescued the wine bottle from where Tarrant had abandoned it on the floor and took it back to the kitchen. He wanted suddenly, desperately, to talk to Blake, but instant vis-messages weren’t possible at any speed higher than time-distort three. Blake was effectively out of contact for the next two days. Not that Avon would have been able to speak to him properly with Tarrant here anyway. 

From the other room, he could hear the sound of Tarrant’s wife’s voice and Tarrant’s warm reply, “Hello darling. How’re the kids?”

*

Avon slept badly – on the floor, having given the sofa up as a bad job at about two in the morning. He had a meeting with Lod of Hirriel about the forthcoming elections at eight, and another meeting with Boorva of Tarl at nine about the same thing, and so the alarm went off at six. His back didn’t protest as much as he’d thought it might, but the long shower was still a relief. He changed in the bathroom and returned to the living area where Tarrant was still asleep. Unlike Blake, he didn’t snore, but the soft sound of him breathing was notable simply because it was unusual. 

Avon made himself coffee and sat back on the sofa to go over the Hirrielae briefing before the meeting. It was a tricky and complicated business, and it wouldn’t be easy to force the matter through without Blake. Even though Avon himself had been the one to initially make contact with Lod and the others, he’d been very glad to hand over the whole revolution to Blake after GP. All of the (soon to be former) warlords of the outer worlds were argumentative. They deferred to Blake, because he was Blake, but they had never deferred to Avon and probably never would. Still, with enough of Blake’s power behind him now, perhaps it would work. 

He lost track of time slightly, confident that Orac would remind him to leave before the meeting, and so the door buzzer took him by surprise. 

“Mr President?” called a voice from outside. “Councillor? Are you awake?”

Avon swore and got to his feet, abandoning the briefing notes. “Give me one moment, Justine,” he shouted, striding across the room to the bed. 

“ _Tarrant._ ” He yanked the covers roughly off Tarrant, who grunted in surprise and alarm as Avon hauled him to his feet. 

“What is it-?”

“ _Quiet,_ ” Avon hissed, trying not to look too surprised to discover Tarrant was only wearing underwear. Blake always slept in his clothes unless Avon had removed them for him. This was supposedly so he could instantly respond to any crisis the next morning or during the night, but in practice it just meant he creased a lot of expensive fabrics, could never actually wear anything twice without washing it, and took longer to get changed in the morning than someone who had started by wearing less. For some reason, Avon had forgotten that not all men were this unreasonable. 

“Someone who knows you’re not Blake is outside,” he explained quietly, manhandling Tarrant across the room. It felt horribly strange to have his hands on the bare skin of Tarrant’s arm, but there was nothing else for it. “So, get in the shower. Now.”

“All right,” Tarrant protested. “Keep your hair on.” He blinked sleepily in the light and pulled the door shut behind him.

“You’ve been spending too much time with Vila,” Avon snapped at the door. 

He returned to the main room, collected the cushions he’d slept on and the blanket he’d slept under, and threw them back on the bed. It would be almost as galling for Justine to assume he and Blake were having a fight that had necessitated one of them sleeping on the sofa, as it would be for her to catch sight of Tarrant and assume he was having an affair. He cast his eyes around for other signs of a non-Blake presence, but Tarrant hadn’t brought anything with him so there was nothing. The sound of water pattering onto ceramic began in the en-suite bathroom. 

Avon tilted his head to one side, easing the cramp, and pressed the door button. 

Blake’s Chief of Staff smiled at him. “Good morning, Councillor,” she said brightly. 

“Good morning, Justine,” Avon said, trying not to look actively unfriendly. Having done this, he realised that if he failed it would probably not be too suspicious and relaxed slightly.He stepped aside so she could push the breakfast trolley into the room. 

Since Avon didn’t really eat breakfast, it didn’t arrive while Blake was away unless Avon asked for it especially. Blake was still away and so Avon had forgotten the process would start again, but the palace staff had not. 

Generally, breakfast was provided by a junior valet, but Justine liked to visit Blake personally on his first morning back at the palace after any time away. It was the kind of irritating professionalism that Avon could suddenly see might well be a problem for his Tarrant-as-Blake scheme. Why couldn’t Blake have been content with using Orac as a major domo/secretary, as Avon did? That the thing complained all the time did not mean it wasn’t the best choice for the job. 

He considered taking Justine into his confidence, but decided that under the circumstances it might just look like a weak excuse for a naked Tarrant being in his bathroom. Justine was also tediously moral, apparently one of the many reasons Blake had appointed her, and fierce in protecting Blake’s reputation. It seemed to Avon unlikely that she would approve of his scheme to dupe three naïve suppliants, particularly if it involved putting Blake in a compromising position. Although she had never said anything and Blake denied it, Avon was fairly sure she viewed his extensive criminal record as something that should naturally disqualify him from being the president’s advisor or (the term was beginning to sit better now) his partner. 

“Did you sleep well?” she asked, as she arranged Blake’s messages on top of the breakfast tray in order of priority. 

“Yes, thank you,” Avon lied. 

All the messages were also available on a datapad underneath, which Blake could use to ‘sign off’ any minor matters with his fingerprint-scan, but Blake liked physical printed data he could mark-up with a pen and the palace staff obliged him. The practice (of writing, not obliging Blake) had actually become quite fashionable as a result, which explained why Tarrant, who had once claimed fingers were designed for pressing buttons, had asked Orac for a print-out of last night’s briefing. 

Avon turned his head slowly towards the bathroom as the sound of _La Marseillaise_ being sung in a strong male baritone began to drift into the room. Presumably Tarrant thought this was appropriate material for Blake. He was not entirely wrong, but silence would have been safer. The added danger of discovery made it all the more necessary to evict Justine as quickly as possible.

“Is that all?” Avon asked as she gave the cut flowers a tweak in their vase and straightened. 

“Yes. I’ll leave you in peace. I had hoped to see the president before he left for his meeting with the Hirrielae-” 

“I’m afraid he’s in the shower,” Avon said unnecessarily as the revolutionary anthem continued to issue from the bathroom. 

Justine smiled. “Not a problem. There’s nothing urgent. I’ll try and catch him at lunchtime-” 

Avon made a note of this threat, and resolved to make sure Orac had given Justine incorrect information about where Blake would be. He smiled at her and she smiled back – both of them aware that the other would probably rather Blake had chosen someone different. 

“I think his singing’s getting better,” she observed as the door opened for her.

“That depends on your definition,” Avon said, still smiling, “of unbearable.” 

He turned away, spotted the attractive, but uncomfortable sofa currently standing in his living area, and turned back in time to catch the woman before the door closed. “Oh, and one more thing, Justine-?”

“Yes, Councillor?” she said, stopping the door with a hand.

“About a year ago, I asked you to take away the sofa that used to be in this room and burn it. I assume that event did take place.”

“No,” Justine said, briskly and unapologetically. 

“No?”

“The president asked me to move it into storage, in case you changed your mind and it could be repatriated.”

“Did he, indeed?” Avon said. “Well, if you could arrange for it to be repatriated before this evening we would both be very grateful. The other sofa should be moved to the reception area.”

“He won then?” she asked with what looked like genuine pride in Blake’s ability. 

Avon sighed with a sick irritation that was not feigned, even though Blake had nothing to do with this particular decision. “Doesn’t he always?” 

The door shut behind Justine, and Avon strode back over the bathroom. He rapped smartly on the door. “She’s gone. So stop wasting the water.”

“All right. I’m nearly done,” Tarrant shouted back. 

“And stop _singing,_ ” Avon added as he returned to Blake’s breakfast tray. He lifted the stack of messages and sorted through them. As Justine had suggested, there was nothing urgent. Everything that had fitted into that category had already been picked up by Orac and passed through to Avon. What remained was a series of personal messages, several minor matters of household maintenance, and a deluge of personal appearance requests. 

Avon took the datapad over to his desk and plugged it into his own personal computer. There he hacked into the fingerprint-analysis software and convinced it that Blake had approved all the personal appearances and the household matters. The personal messages were more difficult to answer and he was still working on them when Tarrant – his face scar-free again – emerged from the bathroom in a black towelling robe. 

“That one’s mine,” Avon told him. 

“Does it matter?” Tarrant asked, lifting the cover on the breakfast and inspecting it. “Nobody’s going to see.”

“I suppose not,” Avon admitted, pressing send at the end of a message to Blake’s pretty cousin Inga, explaining that unfortunately he was too busy at the moment to give her visit the attention it deserved and would be similarly busy for at least another year. He waved vaguely back at the tray. “All of that’s for you, by the way.”

“I assumed,” Tarrant said. “Is this a _guinea fowl?”_

Avon twisted in his seat and gave the tray a cursory glance before turning back. “Yes. Is that a problem?”

“Not at all. In fact, I’m reconsidering whether to resign the presidency at the end of the week. The disadvantages are clear, obviously, but then so are the advantages.”

“Don’t worry,” Avon said with a grin. “When the time comes, I’ll be sure to depose you.” 

He answered the last message (one from Vila saying that Avon was a waste of space and that Blake should dump him – possibly off the top of a tall building) with a cordial thank you (and a request that Vila test the efficacy of his cure – personally, if at all possible). Having done this, he got to his feet and walked across to wardrobe. 

About half of Blake’s smart clothes had gone with him to Teal, so there was a smaller selection of his shirts and jackets hanging between Avon’s than usual. They stood out in soft stripes of blue, green and brown between the black. 

Avon pulled out the tunic Blake had worn on the day before he’d left for Teal, a white shirt and some more trousers that were tight on Blake but would probably fit Tarrant better. It occurred to him as he did so that Blake had never asked for his input on any of his outfit choices – not that this stopped Avon giving it. On one memorable occasion he had even tugged off one of Blake’s ugliest jackets on his way out to a meeting. Blake had turned around, walked calmly back into the room and yanked off Avon’s jacket, as though it had merited similar treatment, and Avon had bared his teeth and ripped open Blake’s shirt – and Blake had been late to his meeting. 

“I’m not even going to ask about these ones,” Tarrant said through a mouthful of potato as Avon draped the clothes over the edge of the sofa. 

“Good idea,” Avon said, returning for Blake’s boots. “As Vila would tell you, ignorance is bliss. Speaking of Vila-” He raised his teleport bracelet to his wrist. “Vila?” There was a pause. _“Idiot._ Wake up.”

“Vila, honey, wake up,” a sleepy female voice said. “Your friend’s calling.”

“I know,” Vila said, muffled over the connection. “I just wish he wasn’t. Go away, Avon,” he said more clearly, as though the bracelet was closer to his mouth. “What time is it anyway?”

“Seven,” Avon said. 

“Oh,” Vila said. “That’s actually quite reasonable. What do you want?”

“Tarrant’s face has miraculously healed during the night. I’m sending him round to see you in about half an hour. He needs to be Blake again by eleven.”

“Sorry, Avon,” Vila said, apparently deeply apologetic. “I’ve got a batch of sensors coming in at nine that Soolin and I are supposed to check-”

“Cancel it.”

“Well, I would but-”

 _“Eight thousand_ credits, Vila.”

“All right, I’ll cancel it. But you had better be the one to tell Blake why the systems upgrade won’t be ready in time for the Firalae-Kinlen conference next week.”

“You can count on me,” Avon said and cut the connection. “Finish that quickly,” he said, indicating Tarrant’s breakfast, “and get dressed. I’m leaving in half an hour and I’m not leaving you here to be discovered by Justine.”

He busied himself around the room as Tarrant changed. The underpants that Tarrant had worn before were a problem in that he refused to wear them a second day, and Avon refused to put them in the laundry basket where they might be found. In the end, time ran out and Avon let Tarrant hide them under the pillows on the bed. Once Tarrant had mostly changed, Avon returned to straighten his collar for him, and point out that Blake wore the thick silver ring on his index finger when he wore it at all. 

“Avon, nobody is going to notice,” Tarrant said crossly, tugging the ring off and sliding it onto the correct finger. 

“I thought I just did.”

“All right then - nobody _else_ is going to notice. Unless they spend as much time looking at Blake’s hands as you do. And anyone in that position would probably notice other differences.”

Avon conceded the point with a shrug, and did not mention that Tarrant was right – Blake’s index fingernails usually had a ragged edges, and the hair on the back of his hands, which were larger than Tarrant’s but still surprisingly elegant, was darker. 

He nodded towards the door to indicate that Tarrant should follow him, pressed the open-button and poked his head out into the corridor. One of the maids was walking away from them in the opposite direction to the one he and Tarrant would take. Any moment now, she would be out of sight and they could go. 

“All right,” he said, ducking back into the room, “this is the plan: you stay at Vila’s until about ten thirty, then go immediately to the Blue Room. I’ll meet you there. If anyone sees you without the scar and questions you about the clothes, say you didn’t realise Blake had the same outfit. It’s all very embarrassing. Now you’ve realised what’s happened, you’ll have to go and change immediately. That should be easy enough for anyone who’s seen you to believe.” 

_“Thanks,”_ Tarrant said. 

“You’re welcome,” Avon said. “If they see you with the scar, tell them,” he smiled, head on one side, thinking of the physical pen and computer print-out, “that it’s become very fashionable.” 

Tarrant made a face. “One might almost think you don’t respect my choices.”

“I don’t,” Avon said. “But don’t take it personally – I don’t respect his either.” That was a lie, but Tarrant didn’t pick up on it. 

Avon checked the corridor again, found it was clear and stepped out, beckoning to Tarrant. The two of them broke into a run without Avon really realising he was going to do it, but as they clattered down the hallway it seemed like the most natural thing in the world. And he was pleased to find that he could still keep pace with a man fifteen years his junior. At the end of the corridor both he and Tarrant instinctively flattened themselves against the wall. 

“This feels familiar,” Tarrant said, and Avon grinned sharply at him. Another quick glance around the corner to check the coast was clear and then they were out into one of the public thoroughfares in the palace. Tarrant went one way and Avon the other. It was relatively early in the day, but this corridor was already full of politicians, aides, household staff members, and other hangers-on striding purposefully to meetings or loitering with intent.

Soolin, one of this latter group, detached herself from a group of elderly men Avon vaguely recognised as part of the delegation from Kinlen, and fell into step beside him.

“So, does Tarrant snore?” she asked.

“He sings,” Avon told her. “In the shower. At seven in the morning.”

“How ghastly.”

“Yes, I thought so. What are you doing this morning?”

“Nothing much. I was supposed to meet Vila.”

“But he cancelled.”

“Yes. Why do you ask?”

“I’m not feeling very intimidating this morning-”

“Singing too much for you?”

“Exactly. And I now need to frighten two old warlords into not cancelling the elections on their planets. How threatening do you feel?”

She shrugged. “Fairly,” she decided and kept walking with him.

*

With two warlords successfully intimidated, Avon and Soolin slipped into the surveillance area behind the Blue Room. Orac was blinking on the desk, and Dayna and Vila were already there – Dayna making minute adjustments to the microphone relay system in the corner of the room, and Vila chatting to Tarrant, who was pacing on the other side of the glass in the Blue Room. The scar was back and looked not only convincing, but also identical to the one Vila had created for Tarrant the day before. On the opposite wall, the space where the missing portrait of Blake would have hung was today filled with a photograph of Tarrant grinning. 

“Good, isn’t it?” Vila said, noticing the direction of Avon’s incredulous gaze. “Dayna took it last night.”

“Wonderful,” Avon said. “Now get out of my chair.” 

“Avon,” Dayna said, coming over to him as Vila shifted out of the way into a more secondary seat, “do we have to use this room?”

“Yes,” Avon said. “Why?”

“It’s too close to the main palace comms. hub. We keep getting interference on the primary channel- I’ve tried to block it, but Tarrant keeps picking up weather reports.”

“Interesting,” Avon said. “And _un_ helpful.” 

“Sorry,” Dayna said, looking devastated. “It was working fine yesterday. I did check,”

“I believe you,” Avon said. His mouth flexed with irritation. “There’s not time to move the meeting. They’ll be here in moments, and we can’t move the Sholians _and_ Tarrant safely.” He made a decision and got to his feet. “All right. I’ll take a look at it.” He got up and heard the rustle of clothing and the creak of a chair. “Don’t even think about taking my seat again, Vila,” he said, inspecting Dayna’s work, which was neat and innovative as always. She handed him a laser probe and he began picking it apart from the inside. 

“Avon,” Soolin said warningly, and he looked up to see her indicate the two-way glass. “They’re here.”

“Welcome back,” Tarrant said from the other room. Today the sound was being relayed from several microphones positioned around the room – a definite improvement in that they no longer needed to listen to Tarrant’s breathing, and the voices of the other participants in the conversation were not significantly quieter than his. “Please do take a seat. And help yourself to water-”

“Damn,” Avon muttered as he removed the probe, having made no progress at all. On the other side of the glass, Yuriana was making more small talk about the living accommodation with Tarrant, Garrock chipping in occasionally with some comment about how spacious everything was after Luminar VII. Krin, it seemed, was drifting around the corners of the long room, inspecting the various portraits. 

“Orac?” Avon said, scrambling to his feet again. “I assume you’re able to take control of all communications coming in and out of this building?”

“Of course I am,” the computer said. “But if you are about to suggest, Avon, that I block or divert all the reports on the same frequency as the receiver currently in Tarrant’s ear, then I must strongly advise against it.”

“That’s exactly what I’m going to suggest. What’s the problem? Surely the palace can survive one day without reports on something we could see by looking through a window.”

“I assume that you still wish this operation to remain a secret,” Orac said, sounding distinctly smug. “Cancelling the reports will certainly draw attention to some abnormality. There is a lower but still significant possibility that someone would notice a change in frequency-”

“So, we change the frequency of Tarrant’s earpiece,” Avon concluded. 

“I thought of that earlier,” Dayna said. “But the only ones available are likely to cause serious disruption to the mechanism.”

“Meaning what, precisely?”

“Well, it could blow the speaker grill for a start.”

“I believe you also have a further problem,” Orac said, now sounding happier than it had in months, “of which you are not yet aware.”

“So make us aware of it then, you stupid box,” Vila said. 

“I am doing so,” Orac retorted, as Avon leaned over the microphone connected to Tarrant’s earpiece. 

“ _Stall_ the conversation, Tarrant. We’re busy.” 

“In accordance with Avon’s instructions,” Orac continued, “I informed Justine Capel that Blake was meeting with the Sholians in the South Wing. She has now reached the room indicated and discovered that that my information was inaccurate. As a result, she is now on her way to this location.”

“That’s not a problem, Orac,” Avon said. “There are guards outside the doors to the Blue Room. Right, Soolin?” She nodded. “Nobody is to go in or out without my authority. Even the enterprising Justine will not be able to force her way in. Now, Dayna, in your opinion-”

“Councillor Avon,” Justine’s voice said from outside. “Open the door, please. I know you’re in there.”

“ _This_ location, Avon,” Orac said. “I did attempt to warn you.”

“Yes, thank you for those vital seconds, Orac,” Avon snapped. “What would we have done without them?” He removed Orac’s key in frustration and glanced at the large wall of glass through which Tarrant could clearly be seen asking about Yuriana’s children. Then he turned back to the door behind which Justine was probably tapping her foot impatiently. “Obviously, she can’t come in.” 

“Might be a problem with that, actually,” Vila said awkwardly. There was a serious of electronic beeps of different frequencies from outside.

Avon gave Vila a sour look as the door slid open. “She knows the code to the door.”

“Well, it’s sort of her job,” Vila explained. 

Avon gave Justine a very thin smile as she stepped into the room, a datapad held loosely in her hands the way Soolin held a gun. “Hello Justine.” He saw her eyes flick to the glass, and around to each of the people in the room, and then back to him. “What an... unexpected pleasure.”

“Would you care to explain what’s going on, Councillor?” 

“Not particularly,” Avon said. “Would you care to leave?”

“Not particularly,” Justine said. “Where is the president?”

“I really don’t know,” Avon said, with a smile. “Somewhere between here and Teal, I imagine.” 

“But you’re pretending he’s here.”

“Demonstrably.”

“Would you tell me why, please?”

“You’ve phrased it differently, but that’s the same question as before,” Avon said. “I still don’t want to answer it. And I don’t have to.” 

“But it would be a lot easier if you did,” Soolin said. As usual, she sounded bored and frustrated with his lack of professionalism. “The Sholians will only deal with Blake, who is out of contact for at least the next twenty four hours. We’ve substituted Tarrant for Blake, as you can see, but Avon is still the one actually conducting the negotiations. It’s no different from what usually happens when Blake is away, except that it’s more ridiculous. Slightly more ridiculous, anyway.”

“Thank you, Soolin,” Avon said sourly.

“I agree,” Justine said. “ _Thank you,_ Soolin. That’s what I suspected, but I wanted to be sure before I made any arrangements.” She turned back to Avon. “In the future, Councillor, would you please inform me if you’re planning anything of this kind? It will make my job a lot easier, which will make your job easier.” 

She tapped various buttons on the datapad. “The rest of the staff will keep away from your rooms until I have confirmation from you of the president’s return. Breakfast will be provided as usual tomorrow morning, but will be left outside the door. I’m think I’m right in saying that Commander Tarrant dislikes kippers-?” Avon shrugged and Justine rolled her eyes, as though this was just another example of his character failings. “I’ll hold them back, just in case. The velvet sofa will arrive back in your apartment at about three pm, but if you’d also like a camp bed brought in that can be arranged and I will think of a suitable excuse. Please just let me know.” She smiled, pressed the door button and glanced back at the glass. “Incidentally, I believe the Commander is trying to communicate with you now.”

Avon twisted, as did Vila, and saw Tarrant casually leaning against the fireplace under the mirror and pretending to laugh. When he thought nobody in the Blue Room was looking at him, he twisted and mouthed _Hurry up, Avon_ into the mirror. His smile looked increasingly fake.

“So he is,” Avon said. _“Vila?”_

“Just a moment, Tarrant,” Vila said into the microphone. 

“Please ask the president to contact me as soon as he is actually back in the palace and it’s convenient,” Justine said. “And don’t ask your plastic box to lie to me again. Next time I will be less forgiving.” 

The door shut behind her. 

“Have I said before that I like her?” Soolin asked the room at large. 

“I’m not surprised,” Avon said. “You two could be related.” He sat back in his chair. “Dayna, adjust the frequency of Tarrant’s headset. If the speaker blows, we will deal with that. Start working on a spare headset, just in case.” He leant closer to the microphone. “All right, Tarrant- we’re ready to start.”

“Let’s get down to business, shall we?” Tarrant said on the other side of the glass.

*

For a while things seemed to go well. Or about as well as Avon had hoped. Blake had already outlined many of the potential options to Yuriana and so he and Avon already had a good idea of the kind of solution they would find broadly acceptable. In the four months between Yuriana’s last contact with Blake and this meeting, Blake and Avon had refined three likely options: partial relocation to another planet in the Luminar system following extensive terraforming; partial or complete relocation to a more distant planet with an already acceptable atmosphere; or artificially increasing the planet’s capacity with airborne and underground structures, as well as artificial food sources. Blake was strongly in favour of immediate relocation, but until this week no Sholian had left Luminar VII and they naturally favoured the third and most familiar option. They were a highly technologically advanced world. If they could trust the rest of the galaxy enough to lower the various shields around their planet they could build upwards in a matter of decades. 

Although it was not his preferred option, Blake was very willing to pursue this scheme if they all agreed it had a good chance of success. However, realistically, before anything could happen, Blake (or, in this case, Tarrant) needed to convince the Sholians that his Alliance could offer them the security they needed. Not only that – membership in the Alliance would bring massive changes to their way of life, and this needed to be presented as an advantage, rather than something to be feared. 

Conviction in the rightness of his new order was one of Blake’s chief strengths as its president. Avon, on the other hand, would, when pressed, admit that Blake’s Administration was better than the one it had succeeded, and that Blake would ultimately always do what he thought was right, and that what Blake thought was right was probably... more right than what anyone else thought. 

He probably did believe in the Alliance, when it came down to it, but only because he primarily believed in Blake. That would not be very helpful here when the words were supposed to come from Blake’s mouth. 

He wasn’t entirely sure that Tarrant would be able to sell the strength and rightness of the Alliance either, although as Chancellor of the new Space Academy he undoubtedly had to do at least some motivation of unruly youngsters. Rather than trust to that, though, Avon’s plan was to delay that part of the discussion until Blake himself returned. Blake could then sit in this room and feed his thoughts through to Tarrant. 

Until that point, Avon planned to focus on the aspects of the scheme he was most equipped to deal with, namely the technical aspects. He’d armed Tarrant with plans for the food generators he’d retro-engineered from the ones on board the Liberator, and a basic knowledge of how they worked. 

This led to a slightly awkward moment in which Garrock observed, “You seem to know a lot about this stuff. I know hundreds of politicians and most of them can’t even turn on a computer. Myself included. Must admit, I have no idea what you’ve been talking about for the last hour.”

“Avon talks a lot about his work,” Tarrant explained. 

“And, of course,” Avon said smoothly into the microphone, “I used to-”

“-be an engineer,” Tarrant finished. 

Then came a few attempts to derail the conversation away from technical matters and onto matters of security, but Avon deflected them all with evasions worthy of Blake himself. 

*

They broke for lunch just after midday and Tarrant snuck in to the surveillance room to complain and eat the sandwiches Justine had provided. 

“They’re getting bored, Avon,” he pointed out, stabbing out at Avon with a ham and mustard sandwich to emphasise his point. 

“So am I,” Vila said from where he was slumped in his chair. “I’m so bored I can’t even be bothered to eat. Whoever heard of a swindle this dull?” 

“My heart bleeds for them,” Avon said. He swirled more sugar into his coffee, tried to drink it, discovered it was too hot and put it back down on the desk. “And for you, Vila, obviously.”

“No, it doesn’t,” Soolin said. 

“That’s right,” Avon said, as though this was a realisation. “It doesn’t. Bored is safe. We will continue to bore them with safe, inconsequential technical details until Blake arrives back. Is that understood?”

“What if they leave before that happens?” Tarrant asked. “I would.”

“I don’t know, but when I want your advice, Tarrant, I shall be sure to ask for it.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” Dayna said, holding out the recalibrated earphone to Tarrant with a grin. 

“Believe it or not, I wasn’t going to,” Tarrant said. He tucked the earphone back into his ear and slipped out of the surveillance room, emerging a few minutes later on the other side of the mirror.

“Can _I_ leave?” Vila asked hopefully. 

“No,” Avon said. 

With the air of a man giving up on life, Vila took a sandwich from the pile and put it into his mouth.

*

For a while, it seemed as though they would get away with it. 

Then the speaker grill blew about an hour after lunch. A high-pitched whine of electrical interference filled the surveillance room, sending Soolin instinctively to her feet as though under attack and Vila clutching at his ears. Inside the Blue Room, Tarrant swore loudly enough to be heard over the whine and fell forward slightly, bracing himself against the table. 

“Oh, I told you this would happen,” Dayna said despairingly to Avon. “I knew it.”

On the other side of the glass, Yuriana had risen to her feet and was attempting to ascertain if Tarrant was all right. He brushed it off as a sudden headache, something he got from time to time as a result of Federation conditioning, but nothing to worry about. 

Avon raised his eyebrows in disbelief. “Two minutes alone and he’s already undermining Blake’s sanity.”

“You do all the time,” Vila pointed out. 

“ _Not_ in front of people who might believe me,” Avon snapped. He cast around the room for inspiration as Tarrant finished assuring everyone he was fine, and that they should get back to work. “All right. What are our options?”

“Well, I’ve finished re-building that other earpiece for you,” Dayna said. “If we set it to a lower frequency, it should last at least another hour. Someone will have to take it in to him, though.”

“Or he could come to us,” Soolin said. “We could stage a temporary crisis, something only Blake can deal with.”

“If our only options are sending someone in or pretending that war has broken out,” Avon said, “even I would prefer to send someone in. The only question is,” he added, turning to the others, “who?”

Dayna gave him an incredulous look. “Not really. Even if we do go in, how is Tarrant supposed to swap earpieces without the Sholians noticing what he’s doing?”

“Why don’t you ask the expert in sleight of hand?” Avon said, waving towards Vila.

“Er,” Vila said. “Ear ache? Or the classic head scratch- that’s very popular.”

“That’s the best you’ve got, is it?” Avon asked.

“What?” Vila said. “Substituting an earphone doesn’t come up much in my line of work.”

“Avon,” Tarrant’s voice said. “Avon, can you come in please?” 

Avon spun towards the glass, momentarily convinced that Tarrant had been so shaken by the interference that he’d lost the power of rational thought and had decided to reveal the presence of the surveillance room. But Tarrant was speaking into his teleport bracelet. 

“Avon, it’s Blake. Could you please stop whatever you’re doing and talk to me for a moment?”

Avon raised his own bracelet slowly to his wrist and pressed the communication button. “I’m rather busy at the moment, Blake,” he said. “ _As you know._ If this is about the Sholians, then-”

“It is about the Sholians,” Tarrant said. “We were just talking about your food dispensing machines. I was making a bit of a mess of it, so I thought I’d see whether you had the time to talk to our guests for an hour or so. Orac tells me your calendar is empty for this hour.”

“My calendar may be empty, but, as I said, I’m busy.”

“And I said,” Tarrant said, getting to his feet and walking casually over towards the mirror, “that I’d like you to come and talk to our guests about your work. Since my word counts for rather more than yours around here, I’m not sure what we’re still talking about.” 

Avon grinned with genuine amusement. “That’s _not_ going to work on me, _Blake._ ”

“ _Do it_ ,” Vila hissed. “You said we needed someone to go in there.”

“Don’t worry, Blake,” Dayna said into her own bracelet. “We were working on something together, but it’s not urgent. Avon will be down in ten minutes.”

“Thank you, Dayna,” Tarrant said. “I appreciate that. I’ll see you in a few minutes, then, Avon.” He released the button on his bracelet and lowered his wrist. “Looks like you’ll get to meet him after all,” he said to the people in the room with him. “I hope you’re ready.”

“What a brilliant plan, Dayna,” Avon said, meaning it was a stupid plan. “But the point of Tarrant having the earphone in the first place is that I can continue to feed him information. I can hardly do that if I’m sitting _next_ to him.”

“You _can_ answer the technical questions, though,” Dayna pointed out. “And it’ll be more convincing if it’s you talking as yourself.”

“And Orac can supply any information about procedure that Tarrant isn’t aware of,” Soolin said. “Face it, Avon. This is the best plan we have.”

“Unless,” Vila said as Avon scowled at the glass, noticed he was biting his fingers again and removed them, "you want me to go in instead of you.”

“Why would I?” Avon said. 

“I play you, Tarrant plays Blake, you talk for both of us. What do you think?”

Avon made a face. “Even assuming that this situation wasn’t already bordering on the farcical, I’d still refuse. You see, the Sholians have already heard my voice, so yours is unlikely to convince them.”

“Are you sure about that?” Vila asked in familiar dry tones. “I’ve been monitoring your speech patterns for a while.”

Avon turned to him. “You _what?_ ” he said flatly.

“It’s quite good,” Dayna said, doing a bad job of suppressing her grin. 

“And rather scary,” Soolin said. “Two Avons. Just what we didn’t need.”

“Come on,” Vila wheedled in his own voice as Avon glared at Soolin. “I’ve been waiting to give my Avon for years. I could do it.”

“Well, now, we’ll never know,” Avon said. “Well done, Vila. You’ve convinced me that the only possible option is my presence on the other side of that glass.”

“Ah well,” Vila said, with a shrug. “It was worth a shot. These ones have met me before anyway, so I'd have to wear a beard. That's never very comfortable. Maybe next time.”

Avon held out his hand. “Dayna, give me the earphone. Soolin, don’t let Vila near the microphone unsupervised. Oh, and Vila?” he added and saw Vila perk up. “Never do that again.” 

“That’s what Blake said,” Vila said with a sigh. 

“Well, unlike you, he isn’t always wrong,” Avon said. He paused and frowned. “Do you mean your impression of me, or... a different impression of Blake?”

“You,” Vila said. He grinned. “Do you want to hear my impression of Blake?”

“Save it,” Avon said, “until hell has at least started to ice up.” He swept his gaze around the room in case he’d forgotten anything he would need and picked up his datapad. “All right. I’m taking this with me, so if you want to contact me get Orac to send a message. I think that’s everything-”

“Actually, Avon,” Vila said, getting to his feet and wrapping a companionable arm around Avon’s shoulder, “I’ve just had a great idea for how you could swap that earphone...”

*

Outside the door to the Blue Room, Avon smoothed his hair down, although he wasn’t really sure why he was bothering. He straightened the collar of his jacket, repositioned the new earphone between the third and fourth fingers of his right hand, and nodded with resignation to the guard standing in front of the door. The man moved out of the way and the door slid open. 

Avon smiled broadly without showing his teeth. Blake had once said he found Avon’s professional attempts to be nice deeply unsettling and unbelievable, but the pose had worked countless times before against countless people. Not for a while, true, but these people didn’t know him at all. Even if Vila hadn’t advised him to give the earphone switch a convincing set-up, Avon thought he might well have chosen the overly nice approach this time. 

The doors shut behind him. “You wanted to see me, Blake,” he said by way of introduction.

“Yes,” Tarrant said, looking up. His own smile was deeply relieved. He got to his feet and moved over to usher Avon inside. “Yuriana, Mella, Minister Garrock – I’d like you to meet Kerr Avon, my chief advisor.”

“I’m also his partner,” Avon said without letting the smile drop. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Tarrant give him a slightly bemused look that wasn’t out of character for Blake. “But, of course, you probably already know that.”

“He’s talked a lot about you,” Yuriana said, smiling at Avon in a way that might have made a different man feel guilty for misleading her. 

“I’m sure he has,” Avon said. “It’s probably all true, I’m sorry to say. Not that you need me to tell you that. I’m sure you heard that conversation earlier. Incidentally, I’m sorry, Blake – my behaviour was uncalled for.” 

“That’s... quite all right,” Tarrant said, trying not to look as though the established order of things was collapsing around him. “Dayna explained you were working on something.”

“And I have been overworked recently,” Avon said. “But there’s still no excuse.”

“It’s quite all right, Avon. I forgive you,” Tarrant said, trying to shut the conversation down before it got any stranger. 

“Thank you,” Avon said and kissed him, two hands firmly around Tarrant’s face so he couldn’t step away.

It wasn’t something he was particularly proud of, but over the past decade Avon had kissed several people who didn’t want to kiss him – at least at the start of the kiss. Some of them had changed their minds as they’d gone on. Servalan, for example, and Pella... two very illustrious footnotes in his history. Vila had definitely not changed his mind, even though they’d both known it was part of the Corrymore con, but at least he hadn’t kneed Avon in the crotch, like Soolin had. That had been a case of misread signals on the way to Betafarl. Avon would never have thought he could get away with kissing Soolin if she didn’t want to be kissed, and as it turned out she didn't and he hadn’t. 

Blake had also pushed him away the first time Avon had kissed him. They’d been on Gauda Prime a few weeks after the Incident, both of them furiously angry and Blake, still recovering from three bullet wounds in his gut, had snarled, “Don’t think I’ll accept that as an apology” as Avon’s back hit the wall. Avon had grinned, the breath knocked out of him, high at having kissed Blake at last, and retorted, “It wasn’t meant to be an apology.”

Tarrant had tensed as Avon’s hands had touched his face and he definitely didn’t relax even as the earphone in his ear canal was removed and the new one inserted. It probably felt like a horrible violation under the circumstances. 

_Blame Vila,_ Avon thought irritably as he pocketed the broken earphone and stepped away. Tarrant looked slightly shell-shocked and Avon tried not to resent him too much for not being Blake. It wasn’t his fault. It was Blake’s fault. And Vila’s, of course. 

As he moved around the table, he nodded minutely towards the mirror, indicating the switch had been successful, and took a seat next to Mella Krin and opposite the chair Tarrant had been sitting in. 

“So,” Tarrant said, resuming his seat with an awkward smile, “now we’ve got Avon here, shall we resume our discussion of the food machines? Avon, I’d just finished explaining – explaining very badly – how the micro-plasma-conduit converts the electronic instructions into edible matter.”

The mention of that specific component was the signal that the new earphone was working correctly. Without realising he had been worried, Avon felt himself relax.

“Yes, of course,” he said, drawing the plans towards himself across the table. “It’s actually very simple-”

“Um,” Krin said from his left, “sorry... to interrupt before you’e even started. But perhaps it would be a good idea if you explained it to me? If that’s all right.” She flinched back slightly as Avon turned to her and he realised too late that he’d forgotten not to look irate and hastily changed his expression to one of polite interest. “That... seems to make best use of our resources.”

“Really,” Avon said. 

“Excellent idea,” Garrock said, sitting up from where he’d been slightly slumped in his chair.

“That way Yuriana and Minister Garrock can talk to the president about the... immediate steps we’ll have to take before we can get started. I, um, know they’re anxious to... get started-”

“Well, I’m happy to leave the plans for another time,” Avon said, dazzling smile back in place. “I thought that’s what I’d been invited to talk about it, but if not-”

“No, I am interested,” Krin said. “I’m just not just sure the Minister is,” she said as Yuriana said,

“Actually - I think that sounds like a very good idea.” It was light and unstudied, and there was no reason Avon could think of that Yuriana should want to separate them, but the speed with which the thing had happened was suspicious. 

“Would that be all right, Blake? Councillor?” Yuriana asked, since neither Avon nor Tarrant had immediately agreed to her suggestion. 

Avon’s eyes flicked to Tarrant. Clearly they both agreed that their separation should be avoided if at all possible, because Tarrant gave a slightly awkward smile and said, 

“Actually, I’d prefer to keep Avon here, if that’s all right.”

“But you did ask him in to talk about the food machines,” Yuriana pointed out. Again, it was a sensible point, but now she was definitely pushing it in a way that seemed to be testing their response. Avon had relaxed slightly over the past five years, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t hung on to a healthy dose of the paranoia that had kept him alive for so long. Would it make more sense to stay, or to convince her that her suspicions were unjustified?

“That’s not his only skill,” Tarrant said. 

“But it is my speciality,” Avon said pleasantly, holding up a hand to stop any protests. “I’d be very happy to talk to you now, Mella. And there seems to be enough room in here to hold at least two conversations at once.” She smiled gratefully. “ Shall we sit at the other end of the table?” He stood, taking the plans with him. 

Tarrant sighed. “I really wish you’d listen to me sometimes, Avon.”

Avon turned to him, momentarily serious, as though he were actually talking to Blake. “Well, what would be the point of that? You don’t need an advisor who agrees with you.” He ducked down to ear-level under the pretence of pressing a kiss into Tarrant’s hair. “Call me immediately if the conversation strays away from anything we discussed last night,” he murmured. Tarrant turned slightly towards him, his face betraying that he was seriously worried now, and Avon squeezed his shoulder and straightened. 

The Blue Room was long – more usually used for meetings of forty or fifty people, rather than four or five, but today called to that purpose because of the observation room behind the mirror. Avon and Mella Krin walked past twenty or so unused chairs and took seats opposite each other at the far end of the long table.

Avon launched into a discussion of the food machines almost immediately, and was pleased to find that Krin already had a good understanding of how they must work, even though she hadn’t worked with the System’s technology yet. They progressed quickly to the teleport and from there to the stardrive, with Krin asking intelligent and reasonable questions at most of the relevant points. Over the last few years, Avon had explained the processes in question to numerous scientists and politicians at Blake’s request, starting with Blake who was, of course, both a scientist and a politician. At the beginning it had seemed to Avon foolhardy in the extreme to go around sharing technological discoveries that would have given them the edge over invading powers, but Blake refused to withhold anything that might improve the quality of anyone’s life and he had gradually talked Avon round, as he always did.

“Besides,” he’d pointed out on one occasion, “with each new invention, it will take a year or so for people to build and test prototypes. So, all you have to do, Avon, is continue to think of new inventions, and we’ll always be a step ahead.” Then he’d smiled charmingly, which was his way of saying don’t worry and Avon’s signal to start worrying because historically the smile only ever meant trouble. 

“Oh, is that all I have to do?” Avon had retorted. “Well then, we could be in serious trouble, Blake. My position in your government has reduced me to pottering in my spare time.”

“All right,” Blake had said easily. “If not you, then Dayna or Deva-” And he’d had to duck the cushion Avon had thrown at him. 

Mella Krin was objectively one of the best audiences Avon’s System-tech speech had ever had. Unfortunately she did not get the best version of it he’d ever given. He spoke mostly on auto-pilot, eyes darting back to where Tarrant was shifting around in his chair and occasionally catching Avon’s eye with increasing desperation. When Krin brought out a datapad containing plans for the Sholian comms. shield, Avon was, despite himself, briefly distracted. The technology was like nothing he’d ever seen before, because Luminar had been closed off well before Ensor had invented the Tarriel cell. It was, in many ways, more foreign even than the System, which had stolen whatever it thought was useful – including Ensor’s most famous invention. 

Looking at the bizarre matrixes that comprised the shield, Avon was increasingly impressed with how well Krin had followed his own explanation. Everything he’d shown her would have been like nothing she had seen before. He was forced to ask questions of his own, although not too many, and he thought from the way she beamed at him that she was probably rather impressed with him too. 

She was obviously not an idiot. Which meant she noticed when Avon glanced casually back at Tarrant and found him gesturing expansively, obviously comfortable again. Avon turned back to Krin’s datapad, his attention entirely focused on trying to pick up what Tarrant was saying, but they were too far away. He glanced back again unconsciously and Krin said gently, 

“Do you want to go back, Councillor?”

Avon considered this, feeling his face contort around the difficulty of being forced to tell the truth without actually revealing the truth. “Yes and no,” he said eventually. “ _No,_ I would infinitely prefer to discuss your work with you, than go back there and discuss Blake’s. But at the same time: _yes,_ I need to hear what- Blake is saying right now. He looks far too pleased, which is always dangerous.” He stood up. 

“You don’t trust him then?” Krin asked getting to her feet too.

Avon looked at her sharply, but he could see from her expression that it was supposed to be a joke. “An interesting question,” he said, smiling to show that he wasn’t taking it seriously either. “Yes, with my life. _No,_ not to follow simple instructions or stick to a planned course of action.” That could have been about Blake or Tarrant. Or Vila, he supposed, or to a lesser extent (because they were both better at following instructions) Dayna or Soolin. How had he managed to find these people?

As he strode down past the chairs, Avon could hear Tarrant extolling the virtues... of planetary relocation: one of the rejected options. He rested his hands heavily on Tarrant’s shoulders and bent down over him to bring his mouth closer to Tarrant’s ear.

“This _isn’t_ what we agreed,” he said, with acidic friendliness.

“True,” Tarrant said pleasantly. “But you know I was never very keen on your plan.”

“It was _your_ plan.”

“It was my _compromise,_ ” Tarrant corrected. “But any compromise is always unacceptable in some way to all parties, and I think we can do better. Now, sit down, Avon, if you’re staying. For some reason, I find your looming particularly unimpressive today. Perhaps it’s the angle.”

Avon stood, releasing Tarrant’s shoulders. “All right,” he said pleasantly and walked around the edge of the table to resume his seat opposite Tarrant, facing towards the mirror. He glanced up at it as he reached his seat, grinned at the people who were behind it, and sat. Then he tried to refocus his attention on Tarrant, even now he knew Blake was back somehow, a whole day early, in the next room. The confidence, the new ideas, even the speech patterns were obviously Blake's. He might as well have formally announced himself.

“So,” he said, “tell me about your new idea. It sounds very similar to one of the old ideas that we’ve already rejected.”

“It is,” Tarrant said, “in a manner of speaking.”

“Blake’s suggested creating an artificial planet,” Yuriana said. 

“Wow,” Krin said. 

“I see,” Avon said. It was actually worse than he’d imagined. 

“Luminar Eight,” Garrock said.

“In the Luminar system, but about ten light seconds out from Luminar Seven,” Yuriana continued. “That would make it closer than any of the existing planets in the system – and means that we could build the environment from scratch, without having to relocate any indigenous wildlife. I know that’s something that Ren and I were very keen to avoid.”

“Is it even possible?” Krin asked.

“I agree, it sounds almost fantastical,” Garrock said, “but Blake assures us it’s been done before.”

“Yes. That’s right,” Avon said. “Almost four centuries ago.”

“About the time Luminar Seven was closed off,” Yuriana said, as though this was in any way relevant.

“Avon even visited the prototype a few years ago,” Tarrant said. “That right, isn’t it, Avon?”

“Yes,” Avon said, feeling his stomach twist. How dare Blake bring this up now, as though he didn’t know what it meant? “The project was code-named Terminal. An apt name given that the project was a dead end. Terminal is a wasteland, Blake. An ugly, inhospitable wasteland. Truly, a triumph of Federation science. The only project that springs to mind as being more immediately and obviously worthwhile was wiping your memory, and unfortunately that, too, failed.”

“Terminal was an early model,” Tarrant said, “I don’t deny that, but as an idea it had enormous potential. I realised, as soon as I read the original project notes, that it could be a good solution to Luminar’s problem, better than anything any of us had suggested before-”

“Really? As soon as you read them?” Avon said. “It’s surprising, then, that I’ve never heard of this plan before.”

“I read the notes during my transfer back from Teal,” Tarrant explained. “Orac, that’s our supercomputer,” he explained for the benefit of the Sholians, “knew I was looking for an alternative to the technological build programme. Your imminent arrival, Yuriana, prompted me to ask for the results of his research. Among the things he suggested was the Terminal project. I couldn’t tell you about it,” he said, turning to Avon, “because I was out of communication range the entire time. Satisfied?”

“Not really,” Avon said. “Not least because you’ve been back an entire day.”

There was a brief pause. “Sorry,” Tarrant said. “It slipped my mind. You do know I would have told you, if I’d had the chance.”

Avon accepted this with a slight and sullen incline of his head. He was aware that he was behaving badly and, rather than look at any of the others, he glanced at his datapad and saw he had a message from Orac. It read: _Blake has arrived early and is now the one dictating to Tarrant, not Vila as was previously the case._

 _Thank you,_ Avon tapped back. _I had noticed._ He pressed send and looked back up. 

“The possibilities are almost unimaginable,” Tarrant was saying. “The Terminal-process is faster than all other known forms of terraforming by about a million per cent. If we begin work now, the new planet could be habitable in _decades._ Perhaps even within our life time.”

“Assuming the process will leave the planet habitable,” Avon said. “I remind you that Terminal was a wasteland.”

“Actually, I think I can help there,” Yuriana said brightly. “We haven’t had much interest in terraforming on Luminar Seven for a while, but environmental science is my speciality. I’ve been in charge of the programme controlling the natural forces on our planet for almost ten years. I should be able to put some of that expertise towards work on the new Terminal project.”

“I imagine so,” Avon said. “You should also be able to assist with controlling the changed weather conditions on Luminar Seven as a result of the gravitational impact of the new planet.”

“That’s right,” Yuriana said, pleased.

“What about the massively accelerated evolution of the creatures on the new planet?” Avon asked. “Will you be able to control that, do you think?”

“I’m sorry?” Yuriana said. 

“No, I apologise,” Avon said pleasantly. "Blake clearly hasn’t explained the full consequences of the Terminal process. In a mere four hundred years, sentient life had _not only_ formed on Terminal, it had actually _passed_ the rung we currently occupy on the evolutionary ladder. I wouldn’t want to stay there for long myself. Who knows what it might do to human biology, _perhaps even_ within our lifetimes?”

“It’s a problem that we are aware of,” Tarrant said. “And one I’m confident that Yuriana, Orac and our own environmental specialists will be able to solve.”

Avon smiled. “And what about the massive planetary migration?” he asked. “Terminal was originally anchored around Mars, I understand, and yet we found it half way across the galaxy. That’s _not_ just drift, Blake. It’s far too fast. Assuming it wasn’t moved by forces unknown, something we would be wise _not_ to assume, it is _just_ possible that the planet itself generates its own means of propulsion. In which case, Luminar Eight could also find itself half way across the galaxy within a matter of years.”

“We’ll find a solution to that, too,” Tarrant said. “Before we begin work on the project, naturally.”

“You’re very confident,” Avon said, grinning.

“ _Yes,_ ” Tarrant said and Avon felt heat rush through him, as though it had been Blake who’d said the word with the warm and casual arrogance of a man who had already toppled an empire and made Avon help him. He could probably make this work, too. After all, what was evolution to Blake? 

“Of course, we’ll continue with the work on the technological build project while research is underway,” Tarrant said.

“Of course,” Avon said, still smiling. 

“Under your supervision initially, Avon, and then gradually handing over to Mella once work on the comms. shield is no longer such a pressing issue. And if that’s acceptable,” he said to Krin, “obviously.” 

“Yes, of course,” she said. Avon felt a sharp kick to his left shin and realised that he’d been absently stroking Tarrant’s leg, as though it were Blake’s, with his foot. Tarrant glared at him and Avon laughed, suddenly amused by this whole ridiculous affair. 

“Good. Then I suggest a forty-year plan,” Tarrant said. “The first step will be for Luminar to officially join the Alliance. We can then legally extend our protection around your planet, and begin to bring your people over here, and our people over to Luminar. There will need to be surveys of both Luminar and Terminal, carried out as soon as possible. I suggest sending-” He paused and then grimaced, his eyes screwed shut and his hand pressed into his forehead. 

Avon was on his feet in an instant, circling the table and ducking down next to Tarrant. “What’s wrong, Blake?” The others also gave similar cries of alarm and Avon had to wave away Yuriana, who was trying to also inspect the invalid. 

“Another headache,” Tarrant said, his voice thick with what was probably feigned agony. “This one... isn’t passing as quickly.” He fisted his hand in Avon’s jacket and dragged him closer. “Weather report,” he hissed against Avon’s face. 

“There, there,” Avon said, stroking Tarrant’s face to hide the rest of their conversation from the bystanders. “How long do they last?” he murmured.

“It varies. But until this one’s over, I can’t be Blake.”

“Blake, we can call today’s meeting to an end, if you’re ill,” Yuriana said. 

“Yes, certainly,” Garrock said. “Of course we can. We’ve all been given a lot to think about. You should rest.”

Tarrant held Avon’s gaze, the two of them clearly in agreement that this was the best possible option. Tomorrow they could schedule the meeting in a different room, away from the comms. disruption. Tarrant would also have time to talk to Blake about whatever his forty-year plan was and then if disaster struck like this again he’d be able to carry on, rather than having to improvise another sudden illness. 

“It sounds a good idea, Blake,” Avon said. “Perhaps you should take someone’s advice for once.”

“Yes,” Tarrant said. “You’re right. Thank you everyone. Avon, could you help me up?”

That was overdoing it a bit, perhaps, but Avon was keen enough to get them both out of the room that he was willing to play along. “Yes,” Avon said, and wrapped an arm around his waist and hauled him to his feet. Tarrant leant heavily against him. 

“Ah,” he muttered into Avon’s hair, “it’s just stopped. I can hear Vila again.”

“Let’s still get out of here,” Avon told him. He turned back to Tarrant as his brain finished processing that statement. “Wait, what do you mean, _Vila?”_

Behind them, the door from the Blue Room into the corridor slid open. 

Avon turned and saw Blake, who was wearing the unflattering silver uniform of Space Command. He’d known it would be Blake – nobody else would have been allowed to pass by the guards, not even Soolin, and the fact that Vila was talking to Tarrant rather than Blake was also fairly unequivocal evidence. That information had given Avon almost three seconds of warning for Blake’s arrival, and so Avon had hoped his face wouldn’t betray the fact that the man he was unforgivably crazy about had just walked into the room unexpectedly. But Blake’s scar was gone. The skin around his eye was smooth and undamaged, as though the scar had never been there. 

Avon’s mouth fell open slightly and, somewhere deep within him, he felt a horrible sense of loss. It wasn’t that he liked the scar. In fact, objectively he’d hated it, just like he hated any other reminder that he hadn’t been able to stop Blake getting hurt. Since they’d been together, he had suggested Blake get it fixed approximately twice a year. But it had been part of the Blake who was his. The unscarred Blake had been his leader and sometime friend, a figure of frustration and unconsummated desire. Avon had held him when the Liberator shook but he had always known he had to let go and deny later that what had happened had meant anything. It had been the scarred Blake that he’d kissed for the first time on Gauda Prime; and who had suggested they should do something about the fact that Avon was in love with him, given that he was in love with Avon; and who Avon had lived with in relative happiness for the last four and a half years. 

The rational part of Avon’s brain pointed out that it was just cosmetic surgery, and that it had been clever of Blake to realise that there couldn’t be two scarred presidents running around in Residence One. The irrational part of his brain was in agony over the idea that Blake wouldn’t want to be with him any more. But that _was_ irrational and ridiculous, and more slowly than he would have liked, Avon pulled himself together. 

“I thought I said nobody was to enter this room without my permission,” he said, more for form’s sake than anything else. He realised he was still holding Tarrant and let go of him hurriedly. 

“Blake asked me to come and talk about my experiences on Terminal,” Blake explained pleasantly. He moved forward to shake Yuriana’s hand. “Space Commander Tarrant. I was with Avon when he visited Terminal a few years ago.”

“Tarrant,” Garrock said thoughtfully, as Blake shook his hand too. “Tarrant - Head of Alliance Space Academy, aren’t you?” 

“Yes, that’s right,” Blake said. “So if you have any questions about military training or security, I’d be very happy to answer them.” The charming smile that spelled trouble was out in full force. Blake’s usual mode when dealing with other politicians was intense and serious conviction – the smile meant that he’d already been very clever and it was too late to do anything about it, or that he was going to try and slide something through that people wouldn’t like if they thought about it. Sometimes it was difficult to tell the two states apart, but either one usually signalled major upheaval. 

“I’m sure we’re all dying to know what valuable information about Terminal you picked up that I didn’t,” Avon said, with heavy politeness, “but as you can see, this isn’t a good time. Blake is ill. We’ve called this meeting to a close for today. It will reconvene tomorrow.”

“Ah,” Blake said. “Well, that is a shame. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to get here sooner.”

“That’s fine. I’m sure you were very busy doing your job diligently and well,” Tarrant said from Avon’s left. 

Blake grinned. “Yes, I was,” he said, and Avon stepped on Tarrant’s foot. 

“Well, under the circumstances, we wouldn’t want to keep you from your work any longer,” Avon told Blake.

“No, it’s quite all right,” Blake said. “The offices are closed for the day, so I have a few hours to spare. In fact,” he said, turning to Yuriana, Garrock and Krin, “if you’re free now, we could discuss Luminar’s integration into the Alliance informally. Perhaps over dinner? There’s a nice restaurant on the forth floor I could take you to. Or we could stay here. I don’t mind.”

Yuriana glanced at the others, who shrugged and nodded. “Yes, that would be lovely, thank you,” she said. “Although I’m afraid we only had lunch an hour or two ago.”

In the gap where they were looking at each other, Avon leaned over to Tarrant and hissed, _“Tell them you feel better.”_

Tarrant gave him a long-suffering look, Avon grimaced in what he hoped was an apology, and Tarrant sighed. “Well,” he said, “if everyone’s staying, then we might as well carry on with the official meeting as planned. The headache seems to have gone for now.”

“Don’t be an idiot, Blake,” Avon snapped. “Five minutes ago you could barely stand.”

Tarrant looked slightly taken aback by this apparent contradiction, so Avon glared meaningfully at him, and it seemed to click. “No, it’s all right, I’m fine. Really,” Tarrant said. “And I’d like to get on if possible.”

“Are you sure?” Yuriana asked. 

“Blake is always sure,” Avon said wearily, looking at Blake to see whether he’d want to respond to that one. Apparently he didn’t.

“I’m sure, thank you,” Tarrant said with a good Blake-like level of irritation. “I feel fine, and I might as well spend my time trying to improve someone’s quality of life than lying on my backside.”

“Good,” Blake said. “Well, then, I agree completely.”

“Of course you do,” Avon murmured, his route back to his seat taking him past Blake, who seemed to be aiming for the seat next to him. He glanced up at Blake, who grinned at him, making Avon grin back whether he wanted to or not. At his former chair, Avon faked a change of mind and went to sit next to Tarrant so he could keep an eye on Blake. The lack of the scar was beginning to hurt less now he’d had time to adjust to it. And it was nice to see both of Blake’s eyes, and not see the evidence that an animal had once almost blinded him. 

“Let’s get on, then,” Tarrant said. 

“Right,” Blake said. “As you requested, Blake,” he said, pulling a stack of datapads from the inside of his jacket and passing the first to Tarrant, “I asked Orac to download all the information we have about the Terminal project for each of us. Avon, your copy should have downloaded to the pad you’ve brought in. I don’t know how much I can add to what Avon’s already told you – what has he told you?”

“Not much,” Avon said, flicking through the downloaded data, “just the reasons I don’t want to go back.” 

“To quite be honest, I’d prefer not to go back either,” Blake said, as Avon tried to magnify one of the diagrams on his screen and found that he could still see an unsatisfactory amount of the inner workings of the manmade planet. “One of my best friends died there. It’s not a place of many happy memories. But I think the project itself has-”

“-enormous potential, exactly,” Tarrant finished, glancing up from his own datapad. “Thank you, Commander. I hope you don’t mind if I finish outlining my plan for the next few years, before we all turn out attention specifically to Terminal?”

“No, not at all,” Blake said. 

Avon glanced along the table to his right and saw lines of text appearing on Tarrant’s datapad, rather than the plans of Terminal that were on everyone else’s. One of Blake’s hands was propped against his chin, but the other one was beneath the desk, where it was undoubtedly tapping messages into another datapad to be relayed to Tarrant. 

“In fact, it’s good you’re here,” Tarrant continued, “as the projected integration of Luminar Seven into the Alliance will involve Space Command and Space Academy very heavily. As you know, the planet has almost no space flight technology at all, so we’ll need to send around a... hundred instructors-” He paused, and Avon could see the professional part of his brain processing the statement that had rattled from his mouth on autopilot. “Actually, come to think of it that might be too many. You only have three hundred within the whole of Space Academy, don’t you? Perhaps something more like sixty would be better-”

“We’ll talk about it later,” Blake said smoothly. 

“Fine. As long as you’re aware of that,” Tarrant said. He glanced back down at the datapad and exhaled. “Particularly since I want you to ensure the Luminar system is heavily patrolled by Alliance ships during the handover period and as the new planet is being built. Given the system’s size, that’s got to be what? A thousand ships? That’s a whole fleet.”

“Not ideal, I know,” Blake said, “but I think you’re right that we do need that many if the Sholians are to feel safe under Alliance protection. What do you think, Minister?” he said, turning to Garrock. “We are talking about your planet, after all.”

“As Blake was saying, very outside my area of expertise,” Garrock said. “But I agree that safety must be our watchword. The previous government-” he began, but Tarrant and Yuriana both cut him off. 

“Well, we can talk about it later,” Tarrant said. 

“Since we won’t be lowering the shields for at least another year, it seems unnecessary to go into this now,” Yuriana said. 

“Exactly,” Tarrant said. “What we _will_ be doing-” 

Avon’s attention had drifted away. If there were modifications to make to Blake’s plan, he could make them later, which would also have the advantage of being less politically embarrassing. For now, Avon was much more interested in the schematics that had been downloaded to his datapad. The screen was still frustratingly too small, but fortunately there was a large conference screen set into the wall opposite the mirror. As Avon passed him, Blake looked up and Avon rested a thoughtless hand on his shoulder before moving to the screen and plugging the datapad directly into its input port. 

The plan of Terminal’s interior appeared on the screen. From the exterior it had looked like a rock floating in space, but the interior plans made it obvious the planet had been constructed rather than naturally formed. There was a layer of top soil approximately ten-thousand meters deep surrounding a light structure comprised of metal girders and forcefields that were powered by magnetic changes. Theoretically it would be relatively quick to construct, then easy to manoeuvre into position and then drop into a fixed orbit. Then with the internal electromagnetic weighting it would theoretically take a force twice that of another planet colliding with it in order to knock it from orbit. Theoretically. It wasn’t Avon’s area, but he had a good enough grasp of engineering to see that it should have worked. Yet, somehow the planet had drifted. It had to be a malfunction of the system somewhere. 

Avon adjusted the magnification of the datapad to zoom out again, and twisted the plans around so he could look at them from the other side. Behind him, Tarrant continued to unfold Blake’s plan for the future of Luminar. Avon swung the plans round again and zoomed out further. He narrowed his eyes. 

“You noticed it too,” Krin said at Avon’s side. 

Avon glanced at her. She’d brought her own datapad, which he could see was displaying the same view of the planet. 

“I’m not sure what I’ve noticed,” he admitted, keeping his voice low so that the others could keep talking. “There’s something wrong, though. Something in the magnetic system-”

“The balance is off,” she said, pointing at one of the edges of the planet. “At least, I think so. I haven’t seen any other artificial planets to compare it to.”

“Ah. But I have,” Avon said with realisation. He raised his teleport bracelet. “Orac? Send the plans you constructed from Ultraworld to my datapad.”

“Ah yes,” Orac’s voice said. “A most fascinating phenomenon. A pity that I had to destroy it in order to preserve your life.”

“All of us make mistakes,” Avon said as the plans of Ultraworld superimposed themselves over the plans of Terminal.

“Given the many tedious projects you have assigned to me in the intervening years that does indeed seem to be the case.”

“Ultraworld was very different to Terminal,” Avon explained to Krin. “The surface was barren. Its inhabitants lived – if you can call it life – inside the planet, which was powered by a giant organic brain. Don’t ask,” he said, as she glanced up at him. 

“The most powerful computer imaginable,” she supplied with a shrug.

“Yes.”

“Organic vanity,” Orac’s voice said from Avon’s bracelet. “The human brain is extensively limited, whereas my limits have-” 

“Yes, thank you, Orac,” Avon said, breaking the connection. “Ultraworld,” he explained to Krin, “was not just a place for its occupants to live. It was primarily intended as an archive, but not just any archive – an archive that gathered its own data. I never saw it move, but... “

“You think it might have been able to?”

Avon smiled lazily. “Why build a data retrieval system out in the middle of nowhere? It’s not like Orac, which can reach out to any other system containing Tarrial cells. Ultraworld had to get its data from physical specimens, direct connections to other physical systems. We happened to wander across its path, but that was just bad luck. Something we had a lot of back then.”

“There’s no obvious form of propulsion,” Krin said, examining the plans. “On either of them.”

“No,” Avon said. “That’s what I concluded too when I first saw these plans. I had no idea what I was looking for, neither did Orac, and frankly I had more important things to worry about. But... with two samples, two artificial planets that move – one on purpose, the other probably through a flaw in the design – it should be possible to work out how they did it. What do they have in common? _Orac,_ ” he said into the bracelet, “give me a list-”

“The electro-magnetised cores,” Krin said. She pointed at the plans. “And look – I was right. The fields are bending in the wrong places because the eccentricity of the Terminal ellipse is so great. Ultraworld is an almost perfect sphere, and as you can see none of the magnetic fields overlap in the Ultraworld plans-”

“Not at the moment,” Avon realised, “but assuming you could manipulate them, you could theoretically pull the planet closer to or repel it from any other mass.”

“Do you think that’s your cause of propulsion?”

“I think it has to be, don’t you?” He raised his wrist to his mouth. “Cancel that request, Orac.” He turned back to Krin, his brain tripping over further revelations. “As for Terminal, the fields aren’t supposed to move, they are supposed keep the planet where it is, but as you say they’re in an unstable design. Any passing landmass of sufficient size would have a sufficient magnetic pull of its own to knock Terminal out of its prearranged position.”

“Four hundred years ago,” Krin said thoughtfully. “There was a meteor shower in this sector. Various different groups on Luminar used it as a sign that we were right – or wrong – to withdraw from the Federation.”

“How big were these meteors?” Avon asked. 

“I don’t know exactly.”

“But big enough,” Avon concluded. He turned and touched Blake lightly on the shoulder, and Blake looked up at him. 

“You’ve done it?”

Avon shrugged with false carelessness. “You’re the engineer. You tell me.” He stepped out of the way as Blake pushed back his chair and stood. All three of them examined the plans for a moment as Tarrant continued to reel off some statistics about the Alliance government that he must be getting from Vila. 

“Just the accelerated evolution to go, then,” Blake said. He turned casually to Avon. “What are you doing tomorrow?”

“Beating you to death,” Avon said, and Blake ducked his head with amusement. Avon smiled at him. “You don’t deserve this, you know,” he murmured. 

“No, I know,” Blake said in a low, pleased rumble. “But somehow I’ve got you anyway.”

Avon hesitated a moment, but to allow Blake to be sentimental would make this whole day, and consequently this particular discovery, worthless. He shook his head and crossed round the table towards Tarrant. “It was Krin’s discovery.”

“Based on your conclusions about Ultraworld,” Krin said, resuming her seat. “And you identified what the fields were for.”

“Yes,” Avon said, smiling. “Well, I may have helped slightly.”

“Is everything all right?” Tarrant asked.

“You could say that. Krin and I have just solved one of your problems for you,” Avon told him. “We know why Terminal drifted away from Mars.”

“Already?” Yuriana asked.

“That’s right,” Avon said, taking a seat. “Essentially, its shape was not compatible with its internal structure. Fix that discrepancy and the Terminal project becomes slightly more workable.”

“And you only started working on this problem twenty minutes ago?” Tarrant asked.

“Yes,” Avon said. “Is that a problem?”

“Of course not. You’re a genius, Avon.”

“I have my moments,” Avon said, not able to resist giving Blake a pleased look. Blake shook his head. 

“Tell me something,” Tarrant said, “will you marry me?”

“ _What?”_ Avon said flatly. Blake had found something very interesting over the other side of the room to stare at, and was covering his mouth with his hand. Avon turned to look at Tarrant, who was staring at him with utter horror. 

“This has been a very unusual meeting,” Garrock remarked to nobody in particular. 

_“Ren,”_ Yuriana snapped. 

“I don’t mean that as a criticism,” Garrock said quickly. “So many of these political conferences are so dull, aren’t they? This has been very exciting.”

“Sorry,” Tarrant said, scrambling to fix what had happened. “Got swept up in the moment. You don’t have to answer right away, Avon. I don’t want to pressure you into-”

“Can I speak to you privately?” Avon asked him and without waiting for an answer he pulled Tarrant to his feet by the arm and over to the door. Rage coursed through him. Avon had no interest in marrying Blake, which would undoubtedly have to happen in some appalling public ceremony that would later be recorded on pictorial plates and commemorative tea towels. The suggestion was dreadful in and of itself, but now it had been made more tawdry by being voiced by Tarrant as a joke.

“ _What_ do you think you’re doing?” he hissed, shoving Tarrant roughly into the wall. 

“Look, I’m sorry,” Tarrant snapped, “but it’s not my fault.”

“Oh really? Then, whose fault is it?”

“Well, let me see,” Tarrant said, pretending to think about it, “if it’s not too much of stretch for you, I’d say it’s yours.” Avon shook his head with a warning snarl. “Vila can share the blame too,” Tarrant said, “but you’re the one who had this ridiculous idea in the first place, Avon. You’re also the one who left me to parrot back everything Blake said all day, and you’re the one who left Vila, a man you knew was bored, evil and capable of a good impression of Blake, in charge of the microphone.”

“It doesn’t matter how good the impression is,” Avon growled, hands fisted in Tarrant’s tunic. “You could see it wasn’t Blake. He was in the room with us.”

“I reacted instinctively,” Tarrant protested. “And you’re lucky my instincts are as good as they are, Avon, or you wouldn’t have managed to get away with any of this.” 

“I think you should say yes,” Blake’s voice said from behind them. 

Avon swung to face him, letting go of Tarrant as he did so. For a moment, he simply stared at Blake, his brain unable to process the situation. Then he said, “Oh, you do, do you, _Tarrant?”_

“Yes,” Blake said calmly.”You’ve been together almost five years, you’re both crazy about each other.” He shrugged: a classic Blake shrug that used his eyebrows and the tilt of his head as well as his shoulders. “Marriage seems a logical next step.”

“Well,” Avon said, unwilling to bring out any of the many arguments he had already made to Blake because too much of his personal life had already been dragged into this meeting and because he’d already made his arguments to Blake and Blake seemed to have ignored them all, “nobody asked you.”

“True,” Blake said and for a moment Avon thought that he’d won. Then Blake said, “Perhaps... they should have done.” He didn’t look like a man who was getting his way. He looked serious and slightly sad, which was much worse. 

“Fine,” Avon said flatly, without giving himself time to think. “I accept.”

“You what?” Tarrant said. 

Blake raised his eyebrows quizzically and Avon sighed and glanced back at Tarrant. “Yes, I’ll marry you,” he said. “Why shouldn’t everyone know?” 

And _there_ was the smug look, creeping across Blake’s face. Avon bared his teeth in warning, but that look had never worked on Blake. He knew, as he had known from the beginning, that Avon was fairly helpless against him. 

“Well,” Tarrant said, trying to sound like he was really pleased with the way things had gone, “that’s wonderful, Avon, thank-”

He broke off as Avon kissed him, pressing him back into the wall he’d only just been released from. The kiss earlier in the day had been fairly chaste, its purpose being a simple cover for the earphone switch. This one was quite different. 

Blake could be incredibly generous - but only really with communal property. Any new ideas were to be shared, wealth was to be distributed equally among the people, but he was not at all generous with things he considered his own. _His_ ship, _his_ crew, _his_ supercomputer, _his_ (chief advisor definitely didn’t work here, as Blake was keen that Avon advise everyone and would usually be found lolling by the door, pretending not to be amused as they took affront) partner. 

His possessive streak concerning Avon had manifested itself most obviously in his anger when Avon had tried to leave the Liberator; his consistent interest in Avon’s relationship with Anna and, to both a lesser and greater extent, Servalan; and most recently in his apparent desire to stand up in front of the galaxy and mark Avon as his own with a ceremony and a ring. Avon didn’t want to actually hurt Blake or refuse him anything he genuinely wanted, so he had accepted the proposal, but he was annoyed and he wanted to annoy Blake in return. Perhaps it was arrogant to assume that sticking his tongue in Tarrant’s mouth would do it, but then again…

 _“Avon,”_ Blake’s voice said from behind him. Avon opened his eyes and flicked his gaze left towards the mirror behind which the others were sitting. He could see Blake reflected in the glass, still sitting, still looking relatively good natured, but with his hand clenched very tightly around the edge of the table. 

Avon grinned into Tarrant’s mouth and pulled back slightly, but not as far as he’d intended to because Tarrant’s hands were wrapped around the back of Avon’s head. Avon looked at him in surprise. 

_“You asked for this,”_ Tarrant said, his voice low and amused and, without more warning than that, he tugged Avon back into him. Tarrant’s tongue forced its way into Avon’s mouth and Avon struggled to free himself for a moment before accepting that he probably did deserve to be violated in return, that Blake would be even more annoyed by now, and that Tarrant wasn’t a bad kisser. In fact, he was a very good kisser now he was fighting back, and he smelled very nice, given that he’d used Blake’s cologne again this morning. 

_“Avon,”_ Blake said again, and this time he must have got up because he put a hand on Avon’s shoulder and dragged him back. “I really don’t think this is appropriate, do you? This is supposed to be a political conference, not a bordello.”

“Then I suggest we adjourn the meeting,” Avon said, panting slightly through his grin. In the mirror behind Blake, he could see that eyes were bright and his lips were wet and slightly bruised. “Until tomorrow then,” he told the rather stunned Sholians. 

He glanced back at Tarrant, who looked as dishevelled as he did, spun on his heel and pressed the door button. The guards stepped aside for him and he swept down the corridor, turning off towards the surveillance room. He tapped in the code and the door slid open. 

“You’re in big trouble,” he snarled, advancing on Vila, who had leapt to his feet at the sound of the door opening and was now attempting to hide behind Dayna. 

To his surprise, Vila grinned and indicated the still open door. “Not as much as you are.”

“Avon,” Blake said, putting a hand on Avon’s elbow as Avon turned to look at him, “can I have a word with you please? Privately.” 

“Fine,” Avon said. He stabbed a finger at Vila, “I’ll deal with you later,” and turned back to Blake. “My office?” It was only one corridor away, and much closer than the presidential suite or Blake’s office, which was inconveniently buried deep in the palace to try and stop tourists coming to talk to him. 

Blake nodded and steered Avon out of the room. The door shut behind them and even though it was reinforced aluminium-alloy, the sound of three people suddenly bursting into laughter was loud enough to reach them out in the corridor. Blake raised an eyebrow and Avon rolled his eyes and started walking. 

“They think they know something funny about my office,” he explained.

“And do they?”

“They know something,” Avon said. “I don’t think it’s that funny, but then I wouldn’t.” Blake still had a hand on his elbow, which was very distracting. “How was your journey back?”

“Brief,” Blake said. 

“Yes, I’d noticed that,” Avon said. They turned into the corridor that contained his office. Avon tried not to mark the way his heart rate had rapidly increased and kept his voice steady. “Will we have to replace all the inner workings of your ship, do you think, or are only some of them burnt out?” 

“Deva has been working on an adaptation of the stardrive for a while. I, ah, persuaded him to use our trip back from Teal as a test run.” 

“I’m sure he was delighted to risk his life for something so important,” Avon said wryly, pressing his hand to the palm reader outside his door. “How fast would you say-?”

The door slid shut, and Avon abandoned his line of questioning and reached for Blake, who pulled him back against the door. Blake’s lips opened under his as Avon cupped his face in both hands, and Avon pressed into him, feeling the hard shape of Blake’s erection already pushing back. The new skin on Blake’s face was smooth under his fingertips and Avon broke away from the kiss, pulled Blake’s head down and licked up from his cheekbone to his eyebrow. 

Blake laughed and pulled his head back. “Don’t be weird, Avon,” he said, unzipping his uniform in one long slide down to groin level.

“Unlikely,” Avon said. 

“Yes, good point,” Blake said as Avon kissed him fiercely again and dragged him away from the door towards the desk. The edge of it hit the back of his legs and he fumbled for the handle on the top drawer. Blake found it before he did and yanked it open for him. Avon stuck his hand blindly in amongst the stationery and, after hunting futilely for a moment, broke away from the kiss to look down at what he was doing. Blake used this moment of distraction and the tilt of Avon’s head to suck hard at the skin just above the top of Avon’s polo neck, where the mark would definitely show above the top of any of Avon’s other shirts. _Possessive,_ Avon thought, shivering at the sensation and the implication, and pressed into the hand that was caressing him through his trousers. His free hand slid into the front of Blake’s open suit and pinched one of Blake’s nipples through his thin undershirt. Blake made a pleased, rumbling sound against his neck and licked up to the edge of Avon’s jaw. In the drawer, Avon’s fingers finally made contact with the bottle of lubricant and he withdrew it triumphantly. 

Blake raised his eyes to meet Avon’s. “Me,” he said in answer to the mute question. “If that’s all right with you.”

Avon started a careless shrug, and Blake grinned and reminded Avon that his hand was still closed around Avon’s cock with a firm squeeze. 

“Yes, it’s all right with me, you sadist,” Avon protested.

“Good,” Blake said warmly, and kissed him and let him go. He pulled his arms out of the sleeves of his SC uniform and shrugged off the top half, so that it hung around his waist. Avon pulled the undershirt off for him, even though it wasn’t strictly necessary, and kissed him again when his face reemerged. He could feel rather than see Blake toeing off his boots and stepping out of the bottom half of the suit, and then Blake pulled away from him and turned towards the desk. 

Avon took a moment as he always did to admire the sight of Blake’s naked back and the curve of his arse, and to marvel at the fact that Blake was his to look at like this. Then, before his vision got too hazy, he pumped lubricant into his hand and slid his fingers down into the cleft of Blake’s buttocks.

Blake grunted as the first finger entered him. His breathing deepened. “I really hope you didn’t do this with Tarrant.”

“Jealous, Blake?”

“Not any more,” Blake said, shifting slightly on Avon’s fingers and dropping his head. “You’re being very convincing.”

“How disappointing. I’m touched by your faith, of course, but I could have been more convincing, if you’d doubted me.”

“There’s nothing wrong with preaching to the choir occasionally,” Blake said. He groaned as Avon pushed another finger into him, drew them all back and slid them back in again. “How many is that?”

“Three,” Avon said, kissing his shoulder blade.

“That’s enough,” Blake said. His voice was slightly breathy now, a slight tremor in the command. He leant his weight on one of his hands, and reached back for the fastenings on Avon’s trousers with the other. 

“I’ll do it,” Avon told him, brushing Blake’s fingers away from his crotch. 

“Then get _on_ with it,” Blake said irritably. 

Avon raised his eyebrows, but of course Blake couldn’t see that. He shook his head. He had his right hand buried in Blake, and the fingers of his left hand were trembling slightly with need and with the observation, which never ceased to surprise and amaze him, that he could make Blake impatient like this. He managed to get his trousers open one-handed somehow and stepped up closer to Blake, as he pushed them down over his arse. He needed both hands to pull his underwear down over his erection, which left Blake a moment to recover before Avon slicked his cock with lubricant and pressed up against him. He bit his lip as he pushed in, and Blake groaned and pushed his arse backwards to impale himself more deeply. Avon grasped Blake’s waist as Blake began to move his hips again. 

_“I’m_ getting on with it,” he reminded Blake and bit down on his shoulder hard before slamming into him. 

Blake gasped, and the sound continued as a low breathy moan as Avon found his rhythm and began fucking him properly. Blake’s fingers were white around the edge of the desk, just as they had been in the Blue Room. The muscles in his back were hard with tension, and his arse was hot and tight around Avon’s cock. 

“Touch me,” Blake growled almost at the same time that Avon’s hand closed around him. “I want-”

“Already - ahead of you,” Avon told him hoarsely. Blake had lost whatever articulacy he possessed with this latest move, and didn’t answer properly. Briefly Avon considered taking advantage of this, but he had other things to concentrate on. Blake was still rocking his hips and his arse clenched and unclenched around Avon’s cock. He was sweating, the tang of it familiar now but still just as exciting. Avon thrust into him again and again, feeling the orgasm rising in him. In desperation, he pumped Blake’s cock harder and was rewarded with the sound of Blake swearing as he came. 

Avon tightened his grip on Blake’s waist, holding him up until he could support himself again. It took a few more thrusts and then his own orgasm hit, and he groaned into Blake’s shoulder. 

They both stayed there for a moment, breathing, and then Blake relaxed back into Avon's arms, resting the back of his head on Avon’s shoulder. Avon kissed the beautiful curve of his jawline and lowered him gently to the floor. They shifted slightly around each other until Blake was lying flat on his back with Avon's head resting on his chest. Avon pulled his trousers back up, and refastened them. 

The floor was the usual hard alloy of all the other floors in the building, but Avon had installed a large, soft rug fairly early into his occupancy of the room. He'd assumed the others had ascribed this to a taste for luxury, which was not entirely inaccurate. Now, it seemed increasingly likely that they knew what it was actually for, but it was difficult to care much whether or not everyone knew how he felt about Blake with his cheek resting on the soft skin of Blake's chest, and Blake's hand gently caressing the small of his back through his shirt.

"Do you want to tell me your real thoughts on the Terminal plan?" Blake asked.

Avon titled his head to look up at him. "You think I was holding back?"

Blake chuckled and the sound reverberated pleasantly through his chest. "No."

"Good," Avon said, kissing him just above his right nipple. "Because if there are more obvious problems with this scheme than the ones I've already mentioned, then I really think it's a bad idea."

"Every scheme has problems," Blake pressed. "But if we solve the ones we've identified-"

"We will undoubtedly find more as we go along."

"Which makes this no different from any other plan I or anybody else have ever had," Blake pointed out. "Except that you have a personal reason for disliking this one." Avon hadn't moved from his earlier position, so he was able to bite Blake gently but firmly over the nipple to tell him what he thought of this. "No, I didn't forget," Blake said. 

"I didn't think you had."

"I did wonder, however, whether you might be unfairly biased against this idea. Initially. Now you've had time to think about it, and to accept my assurances that I didn't keep it from you on purpose-"

"Have I?"

"Avon, could you answer the question please?"

Avon nodded over Blake's chest and unconsciously kissed the area he'd bitten earlier. Blake did not rush him, which was good because the mention of Terminal had made Avon irrationally angry again, and he needed time to breathe and lie in Blake’s arms before he could do what Blake asked and consider the matter properly.

"There are still problems," he said eventually, "numerous problems, but you're right - that's to be expected from any scheme. If we work out how to control the rate of evolution within the next five years, I see no reason why we shouldn’t begin initial testing. But I would advise a period of at least forty years to allow the prototype to settle. And a small test group of volunteers should be sent to live there with their vital signs closely monitored. We cannot begin work on relocating the Sholians until we know the planet will be safe. That will take time."

"Not within our lifetimes, then," Blake said ruefully.

Avon tilted his head up to look at Blake's unscarred face. "You don't think you've seen enough change already?" he asked. Blake smiled and Avon grimaced. "Of course you don't."

"You know me better than that."

"Yes, I do,” Avon said, smiling back, and Blake pulled him upwards so they could kiss properly. 

“Other than that,” Avon said, settling himself in the crook of Blake’s shoulder, “as long as you’re willing to wait, and you plan to go ahead with the technological build programme in the mean time, I don’t see much that can go wrong.”

“That’s what I thought,” Blake said. “So, you agree this is the best course of action?”

"Possibly.”

“Well, what would you prefer?”

“I don’t know. That doesn’t mean you should just assume you’re right.”

“Don’t worry,” Blake said, stroking his hair. “I’ll ask Orac for a third opinion. And various other people, too, if you like.”

“Of course, it will be extortionately expensive,” Avon said, after a while. “To essentially pursue two planetary-wide relocation schemes at the same time- I assume _we_ will be funding both of them?”

“Yes,” Blake said. “But, ultimately, the money is not what’s important. What’s important is finding the best solution.”

“Don’t pretend we see eye to eye on this, Blake. We don’t.” Blake’s laugh rumbled through his chest again. “I’m not joking,” Avon told him.

“I know you’re not,” Blake said, still laughing. He titled his head to look down at Avon, his expression growing serious. “Have you considered the fact that you’re going to be on Luminar Seven for at least a year to oversee the initial stages of the construction?”

“No, I hadn’t,” Avon said flatly. “Thank you for pointing it out to me.”

“Sorry,” Blake said, his tone suggesting that Avon had taken offense unnecessarily, rather than that he was sorry. “But you hadn’t mentioned it.”

“I’m... trying not to think about it,” Avon admitted. “But it will take at least a few months before we’re ready to actually begin work. In that time, you could promote someone else, I could prove to be untrustworthy-”

“You could commute,” Blake suggested.

“Even with Deva’s refurbished stardrive, the journey between Luminar and Earth would still take about twelve hours.”

“Mm,” Blake said. “Weekends only perhaps.”

“I’ve changed my mind, Blake,” Avon said, climbing onto him. “I don’t like this plan. I don’t think we should go through with it.”

“This part’s your plan,” Blake pointed out, bringing a hand up to cup Avon’s face. 

“Then you know,” Avon said, kissing him, “that I’m not unfairly biased against it.”

“Yes, that’s not actually how it works.”

"Avon," Orac's voice said from Avon's bracelet. "This is a reminder that you have a meeting with the Thurian ambassador in half an hour.”

"That's one of yours," Avon said. He slid off Blake and stood, offering him a hand up. "Since you're back, you might as well go to it. There should be some of your clothes in the cupboard. Just make sure you don’t run into Yuriana in the corridors."

“Sounds reasonable,” Blake said, pulling on his underwear again. "Do you want to come with me?"

"No," Avon said. He located a box of tissues, and wiped the surface of his desk. 

"All right. Will you come with me anyway?" Blake asked, catching Avon around the waist and drawing him in. He looked very appealing: still mostly naked, his face restored to its former handsomeness, and his hair dishevelled from lying on the floor. “I’ve missed you.” 

Avon pretended to think about the question. He leant forward towards Blake’s lips. "No," he said. “I think I’ll take a shower and think about how pleasant it is not to be working while you are.”

Blake kissed him anyway. “You’re a cruel man, Kerr Avon.”

“It has been noted.”

"Will you marry me?"

"I've already said yes."

"I know,” Blake said. “I just wanted to be sure. And I wanted to ask properly."

“Well, now you have,” Avon said, pulling away from him. He opened the stationery cupboard, removed the second set of clothes that Tarrant had rejected the day before and pressed them into Blake’s hands. “I hope that satisfies you. Now you only have twenty five minutes until the Thurian meeting, so get dressed.”

Blake pulled on his clothes quickly and without bothering to look at himself in the mirror hanging on the inside of Avon’s cupboard door. Avon busied himself with straightening the room, so he wouldn’t get distracted and distract Blake, and when Blake was ready he joined him at the door.

Much as he had with Tarrant earlier in the day, Avon motioned for Blake to remain quiet, activated the door button and peered out into the corridor. 

“It’s empty,” he told Blake, who still looked out cautiously as he exited, as though to verify that Avon had been telling the truth. Avon made a face at him and Blake sighed, as though to imply this was very childish.

“I’ll be back at- when does this meeting finish?”

“Nine,” Avon told him, pulling the edge of Blake’s collar out from under his tunic and straightening it for him. 

“Three hours?” Blake said in horrified surprise. “What’s this meeting even about?” 

“It’s a meeting with the Thurrian ambassador, to discuss-”

“-to discuss their gradual encroaching into Seccarro territory,” Blake finished. He nodded. “All right. I remember. I assume I have the Seccarro tomorrow?” 

“At eight,” Avon told him. “Before another full day with the Sholians starting at ten. And then you have a follow-up meeting with Lod at seven-”

“All right. That’s enough. Don’t rub it in,” Blake said. “I’ll be back at nine thirty.” He leaned over and kissed Avon lightly in parting. Avon accepted this sort of thing most of the time, but Blake had been away for two weeks and so Avon hadn’t had time to readjust to his presence. As Blake pulled away from the gentle brush of lips, Avon grabbed him and pulled him back, opening his mouth and licking at Blake’s tongue when it pushed into him. Blake’s body crushed him against the open door frame and it was the most wonderful feeling imaginable. 

_“Avon!”_ Tarrant’s voice shouted from what seemed like a very far away. “How could you?”

Avon broke away and peered over his shoulder down the corridor. There was Tarrant, striding towards them, and with him -

"Ah," Blake said as he saw Yuriana.

“Shit,” Avon muttered. “Shit, shit.” He pushed Blake away, although it was strictly speaking a bit late for that.

“How _could_ you?” Tarrant demanded again. “We’ve only just got engaged!”

“I can explain,” Avon began as Tarrant reached them.

“Can you?” Tarrant asked. “Can you, Avon?” He made an obvious attempt to calm down. “I’m sorry about this, Yuriana-”

“It’s all right, Commander,” Yuriana said. “I know.”

Avon’s eyes flicked from Yuriana to the man she was looking at, which in this case was Tarrant.

“I’m sorry, what do you know?” Tarrant said.

Avon grimaced. "I assume the game is up."

There was a brief pause and then Tarrant relaxed, although he still looked deeply annoyed. "What a colossal waste of a day." He turned to Yuriana. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that to be rude-”

"I'm Blake," Blake said, bowing to Yuriana in a manner that suggested he'd read Avon's notes from earlier. "And I'm very sorry about what happened. We really don't do things this way usually, but I was off-planet when your message came through. We didn't want you to leave when you found I wasn't here. This was too important."

"Blake's being very diplomatic," Avon said. "Names are not being named, plural pronouns are being used.”

“It’s all right, Avon,” Blake began gently, but Avon put a hand on his arm. 

“Kind, but under the circumstances rather short sighted.” He looked back at Yuriana. “The truth is that this had nothing to do with him. Tarrant didn't like it either. But Blake was off-world, and I threatened to fire Tarrant if he didn't go along with it. If you've lost your trust in us over what's happened, then I understand, but you should know that I was the only one who wanted to trick you. The former criminal and failed embezzler, not the hero of the revolution or his government. And even I wouldn't have done it if I hadn't been desperate. If you'll believe it, a supercomputer that predicts the future said this was the only way we could stop you leaving in Blake's absence."

“How flattering," Yuriana said.

"It didn't know you," Avon said sourly. "It became obvious fairly early on that you were a sensible, rational woman who would have accepted Blake's apology for his absence. As much as it pains me to admit it - I should have listened to him." 

“Can we try again tomorrow?” Blake asked Yuriana. 

She looked surprised. “Of course. We still have to save my planet, and you’re not only our best option, you may well be our only option."

“How flattering,” Blake said, with a smile. “But I hope we can be a good option, too. We really do want to help.” 

“I believe you,” Yuriana said warmly. She bowed to him and he bowed back, and then she turned to Avon. “If you do try _this,_ ” she pointed at Blake and Tarrant, “again-”

“We’re definitely _not_ going to try this again,” Blake said firmly.

“But if you do,” Yuriana continued, looking at Avon, who grinned, “don’t let _him,_ ” she pointed to Blake, “into the room. You were doing well up until then. None of us suspected at thing.”

“Well done, Blake,” Avon said, twisting to look up at Blake, who raised his eyebrows.

“You didn’t look at anyone else for more than a moment,” Yuriana explained. “I’m afraid it was quite obvious almost immediately.” 

Vila wasn’t around, so nobody started laughing, but Avon shut his eyes anyway, and willed himself anywhere else. 

“Will you be attending tomorrow’s meeting?” Yuriana asked, proving it hadn’t worked and he was still in this corridor with these people.

Blake gave him a nudge and Avon realised she’d been talking to him. He opened his eyes and nodded. “I don’t have anything better to do.”

“Then I’ll see you tomorrow,” Yuriana said. She bowed to Blake, and then to Tarrant. “A pleasure meeting you, Commander.” 

_“Well,”_ Tarrant said, turning to Avon as Yuriana walked away.

 _“Well?”_ Avon asked dangerously, daring him to say anything. 

“That’s over then,” Tarrant said. He scratched at the scar on his face, which began to peel off in unappealing chunks of silicon and latex. “I assume I can go back to work tomorrow?” 

“Yes,” Avon said absently. What Tarrant did or did not do with his day was a long way down on Avon’s current list of things to worry about, under how he was going to have to kill himself now, how he was going to survive a year without Blake, and how many people he could feasibly ban from his wedding. 

“Thank you for helping out,” Blake said to Tarrant. “I do appreciate it, even if it didn’t work.”

“We are going to talk about your plans for the Academy,” Tarrant said. “ _Before_ you promise anything else to the Sholians.”

“Yes, I know,” Blake said. “You made that quite clear." 

“Oh, and, by the way,” Tarrant said with a grimace, “you both reek of sex. That’s how they know, Avon.”

Avon shut his eyes again. "Poison," he decided.

"I'm sorry?" Blake asked.

"That's how I'm going to kill myself," Avon explained flatly. "Excuse me," he said, turning in the direction of the presidential suite.

A few steps away he was met by Blake, who draped an arm over his shoulder. "I'm coming with you," he explained, pressing a kiss to Avon's cheek.

Avon raised an eyebrow. "I'm not actually going to kill myself. Just take a long shower, and try and work out how my life has come to this.”

"Apparently I need a shower, too," Blake said. " _Unless,_ " he said, lowering his voice, "you _want_ everyone at my next meeting to know that you fucked me over your desk not twenty minutes ago?"

Avon considered the matter. "Well. When you put it like that-"

"Good."

“-I'm not sure I do mind them knowing after all,” Avon said, with a grin.

Blake feigned shock, and Avon failed to resist the urge to kiss him in public. Blake didn't let him go, and Avon stumbled into a wall as the corridor forked off towards the presidential suite, and had to let Blake guide them round it. 

“Avon,” Vila’s voice said through the teleport bracelet on Avon’s wrist. “Avon, Avon, Avon, _Avon._ Are you there, Avon?”

Blake broke the kiss and raised Avon’s hand to his mouth. “Go away, Vila.”

“You should be nicer to your Yenta,” Vila said and it sounded like he was grinning. “They get a lot of respect in some cultures.”

“I _am_ being nice,” Blake told him. He rolled his eyes at Avon, and the two of them fell into step down the corridor.

“Really? I must have missed that,” Vila said. “Anyway. Just ask Avon when he’s planning to pay up, will you?”

“Never,” Avon said, taking his wrist back. “How does that sound?”

“Very unfair. Tarrant says the Sholians know. That means you lost and I won.”

“But the bet is void,” Avon pointed out. “Since you agreed not to deliberately sabotage my meeting with the Sholians.”

“Oh right,” Vila said glumly. “Yes, I’d forgotten that clause. So, it was all for nothing was it? Restructuring the palace internal security three times, making up Tarrant’s face twice, missing a whole day of work? Of course it was. Just accept it, Vila. Hey, Avon, have you told Blake about the Firalae-Kinlen conference yet?”

“Vila needs more time,” Avon told Blake. “The sensors aren’t ready yet.”

“Fine,” Blake said. “I’m sure we can push it back a few days.” He pulled Avon’s wrist back up to his mouth and again, and said indulgently, “And I’ll pay Avon’s debt, Vila.”

“Really?” Vila said. “That’s very good of you. I take cash or direct bank transfer. See you tomorrow.”

“How much is it?” Blake asked Avon, pressing his hand to the palm reader outside their rooms. The door slid open. 

“Eight thousand credits,” Avon told him, managing to keep a straight face, but only barely.

“ _What?_ ” Blake said.

“Ultimately money is not what’s important, Blake,” Avon told him sweetly, not quite managing to keep the smirk out of his voice this time.

“Eight _thousand_ credits?” Blake repeated. “That’s twice my monthly salary.”

Avon pulled off his jacket and dropped it over the arm of the old velvet sofa. Unfortunately this didn’t conceal very much of the sofa, but Avon felt it was worth starting somewhere. “Should I have warned you?” he asked casually.

“You know you should have,” Blake said, tackling him to the bed. 

Avon hummed with contented amusement as he caught Blake’s face between his hands, and kissed him thoroughly, rubbing his stiffening cock against the hand Blake had brought down between them. 

“Oh,” he said, as Blake moved down to kiss his neck, “and you owe Tarrant a raise.”

“Fine,” Blake said. “Now don’t talk about Tarrant while I’m making love to you.”

“You have a meeting to go to,” Avon reminded him.

“Don’t change the subject.”

“I thought you weren’t jealous.”

“I’m not,” Blake said, his face creasing with amusement. He propped himself up on an elbow and pulled a strand of Avon’s hair towards himself. “Didn’t you hear what Yuriana said?”

Avon grimaced, and pushed him away. ”Unfortunately,” he said, getting up off the bed.

“I really don’t think I have any cause to be jealous,” Blake said, rolling onto his back. “I never have and I never will. You love me. You’re not at all interested in anyone else. In fact, you can’t keep your eyes off me.”

Avon grinned sharply at him. “ _Watch_ me,” he said, and disappeared into the bathroom. 

He turned the water on and pulled off his shirt. 

“Avon?” Blake called from the bedroom. “Can you come back here a moment?”

Avon dropped his shirt on the floor and returned to the bedroom. Blake was still in the same position he’d been in when Avon had pulled away from him, but now he looked perturbed. Avon raised an eyebrow and Blake held up a ball of white cotton. 

“What are Tarrant’s underpants doing in my bed?”

Avon grinned at him and turned back to the bathroom. "Wouldn't you like to know?" he said.

**Author's Note:**

> Here are some things I know about this universe that are hinted at in the fic: 
> 
> The palace (also called Residence One) is one massive multi-floored building, basically a dome of its own. It has a lot of very similar looking white corridors, but the rooms are generally more individual-looking than the doom rooms we see or any Federation rooms. Blake believes in individuality. The Blue Room is ridiculously opulent for no reason, and looks like an 18thC French banquet room. 
> 
> Blake's government should probably be less nepotistic than it is, but equally - he knows he can trust these people. 
> 
> Tarrant is in charge of Space Academy. He got married almost immediately after the Federation fell, partly because he'd met a nice girl (who was the daughter of some other top space commander, I think), but mostly because he really wanted to get married. He has two children (twins), who call Avon 'Uncle Avon' because Vila told them once that Avon would hate that and it would be very funny, and they think Vila is a god among men.
> 
> Vila and Soolin together handle the security for the palace. Vila does the stuff about the locks, and Soolin marshals the physical security force. Ocassionally she hangs out with Avon while he's working, because she finds him less annoying than everyone else she knows. Soolin isn't interested in romance or sex with anyone, I don't think, which has worked out well for Vila. A few months ago a very tall, very beautiful, very perky bounty hunter showed up at the palace intent on marrying Soolin. Vila realised she was pretty much his ideal women, and begged Soolin to repel her in his direction. They're currently sleeping together, and Vila is not thinking about it too much in case it stops happening. 
> 
> Dayna is working in weapons tech. She is currently pursuing Deva, who is convinced she is joking and keeps making excuses to make a hasty exit. She hangs out at Tarrant's house quite a lot because he's much less annoying now he has a stable family life and she always liked him anyway. 
> 
> I figured since I'd just made everyone alive after GP that there was no reason Jenna shouldn't also be alive. So - Jenna is alive! She is Blake's regular pilot, but also his lieutenant out in the field, while Avon is his lieutenant back at the palace. She is married to a nice sensible man in Soolin's guard. Jenna realised that Blake was a self-indulgent mess she would have to spend her life looking after/that she was better off just being friends with him almost immediately after Gan died. Some time after 'Star One' she told him that she'd had a crush on him when they'd first met, and Blake looked awkward and said that he knew. And Jenna said 'but you were always in love with Avon, weren't you?' and Blake started choking and had to be thumped on the back several times, because he didn't know that anyone else knew that. 
> 
> I don't know how or why the GP shoot out was averted, but it was. 
> 
> And they all lived... 
> 
> ...happily ever after. 
> 
> Well, now - why not?

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [I Shall Have Share In This Most Happy Wreck](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1027218) by [aralias](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aralias/pseuds/aralias)
  * [The Rain It Raineth Every Day](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1032732) by [elviaprose](https://archiveofourown.org/users/elviaprose/pseuds/elviaprose)




End file.
